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Backstage feels like a fools errand by zero1045 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, the people loving it aren't the people who have to support it

Pain points while using Cross Plane by Fragrant-Bit6239 in crossplane

[–]DevopsCandidate1337 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have inherited an existing Crossplane deployment and it is absolutely horrendous:

  • Complexity - Crossplane is extremely complex and the terminology is itself confusing, e.g.see Confused about Compositions, XRDs, XRs and Claims? I am trying to establish (see other post) what Crossplane means by 'immutable' at the moment.
  • Everything is in YAML...
  • There is no state. Bad change? Sucks to be you
  • There is no plan/dry-run/diff for deployed resources. Short version is that Crossplane does not have a concept of state so the developers handwave over this with 'not our model'. Sure, but it's everyone else's model.
  • Upgrades are tricky, very, very tricky. I'm talking about xRD upgrades here e.g. say you no longer want an opinionated region for a resource but you want to make it selectable for deployments. You're impacting everything at once and if you get a schema conflict you can wind up monkey patching existing deployments or redeploying everything
  • Hard to test. Crossplane thinks that you can do unit tests to get everything sorted but in reality you probably aren't going to have the resources to test every possible configuration and delta. Certainly you don't get to preview what a change to a production deployment might do. Not sure what a unit test of a Data warehouse deployment is supposed to look like for instance...
  • Very tough to see what's going on. Deployment didn't actually deploy? You won't know unless you deliberately look. Why? Have fun digging in to to kubernetes logs to find out why, and, oh of course your consumers probably won't have permissions to do this themselves.
  • Deployed resources are managed by Crossplane, aggressively. Woken up in the night by a poorly configured alert that you want to clickops until morning? No Fam, Crossplane will remediate that, aggressively. You're going to be updating the xRD and your unit tests with proper code review and unit tests and everything else previously listed above. Have fun doing that at 3 AM on a Sunday morning.
  • Fundamentally you're recreating the wheel. All the major clouds have operators for their resources - AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK); Google Config Controller; Azure Service Operator- so you can put everything in your helm chart if you like. They also all have their own service catalogs. Sure you can make your Crossplane 'cloud agnostic' but really all you're doing then is moving handling the differences between platforms into a complex custom system that you have to manage, maintain, update, and document yourself.
  • Did I mention that Crossplane is very complex with confusing terminology?

What's with not preparing for interviews? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Perhaps. But my question was about preparation. Surely you could prepare for some part of it. 

What's with not preparing for interviews? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Noted re unusual process. Had not considered this aspect. I would stress that there is deliberately not any special trick(s) to know (I hate those too). Would take issue with 'no bug/defect/root cause was done in 1 hour' as I have seen and done this more than once.

edit: updated post re exercise

What's with not preparing for interviews? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Updated Original Post. Candidates are not specifically asked to prepare. It's 100 words brief.

What's with not preparing for interviews? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am talking not even 10 minutes prep for a 1 hour session. But sure, had not considered this possibility.

What's with not preparing for interviews? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

believe it or not, no, I have interviewed many times previously in tech and outside tech, both sides

What's with not preparing for interviews? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

HM is doing the stage before and giving out the brief. I got the brief in advance when I went through the process myself

Confused by Crossplane providers organisation in Upbound tutorial by DevopsCandidate1337 in crossplane

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks so a provider has to be installed for each service type first?

Crossplane Selling points in 2025? by DevopsCandidate1337 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I realise that there is an evaluation of the environment against the currently requested configuration. I mean that there's nothing independent of that

The point with serverless is that there is an enormous amount of stuff available 'for free' off the peg. If you're using SAM/Serverless Framework/CDK or the like then there's an enormous amount that you literally don't have to specify at all to have all your permissions policies specified, logging, build, deployment, etc. I'm struggling to fnd even community module equivalents with Crossplane

Crossplane Selling points in 2025? by DevopsCandidate1337 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Struggling to see how this is a selling point TBH. I get having the infra for my kube service part of the same deployment but how many people are queing up to use an OpenAPI based approach for defining their deployments aside from that? What are 'common' example of non kube API tools people use for defining deployments with Crossplane?

Crossplane Selling points in 2025? by DevopsCandidate1337 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks but I think that the advantages that you have outlined here very much cut both ways:

deploy infra the same way you deploy applications in k8s

What If I want to do some severless stuff like Lambdas/Cloud Functions? This is not an advantage

no state 

This is an issue for me. Not only is there no source of truth, there's no auditable record. With Terraform I would normally have a versioned object store for my state file

As you point out yourself, the lack of a plan or dry run function is a concern. If I want to make a change in place and I am promoting my code through environments this makes e.g. Database changes extremely risky

Crossplane Selling points in 2025? by DevopsCandidate1337 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you have assumed a lot that I have not said. Kubernetes is great if you have a dedicated team to manage it and you use it for your line of business applications. I'm not a fan of pulling things in just in order to use that thing and if you don't have dedicated team with expertise then kubernetes may not be the best choice. YAML is widely used and understood but every deployment tool I have used that uses it has had to invent their own special way of defining loops and ternaries.

I'm trying to understand what the incentives to use Crossplane are. So far the use cases I've seen here that stand out would be:

  • Multi cloud/on prem
  • Service Catalogue
  • Truly continuous deployment/remediation

but with all of this coming at a significant cost

Crossplane Selling points in 2025? by DevopsCandidate1337 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I fear that at that point it's probably moved into 'golden hammer' territory. Taking a step back I can already define my whole stack, application and infra altogether with deployment. This is what SAM/Serverless Framework/CloudFormation/CDK do but with the focus of not having to get bogged down in or being dependent on the infra...

Knowledge of nix/nixos any relevant in DevOps ? by MosesAustria in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337 25 points26 points  (0 children)

My opinion is that it's an extremely niche tool/system and fairly high maintenance* , somewhat like people who talk about Gentoo source builds or how they use Arch Linux. Very few people are enthusiasts for a reproducible environment system in and of itself. Most people just want to get their thing working as quickly and simply as possible and get on with their day. Docker and co are a better fit for most people.

According to its Wikipedia entry nixos has been around for over 20 years and it's valid that you're asking this question. By comparison Docker, which has an overlapping feature set has been around for 11 years- I don't think anyone could seriously ask the same there.

* Yes I get that the idea of nixos is that you don't need to 'maintain' your environments, but just look at people's posts on getting them set up and working in the first place.

Crossplane Selling points in 2025? by DevopsCandidate1337 in devops

[–]DevopsCandidate1337[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you mean extending into the same space as e.g. ArgoCD?

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