DevOps

[fool]

It is system administration done by automating tasks as much as possible. It requires programming skills. Actually the inventor of this philosophy (a Google engineer) defined it as system administration done by developers.

The whole thing is described in a book, "Site Reliability Engineering".

This is both right and wrong.

Technically, DevOps is a culture and a super tribe of Development and Operations working together to improve the overall system and learn from each other. This also tends to pull in Testing, Security and Product Managment.

More pragmatically, DevOps tends to be used to mean:-

• Sysadmin who can automate, often now "Platform Engineers".
• Release Engineer who looks after pipelines and possibly tolling.
• Developers consuming PaaS / SaaS services who think they're doing NoOps when they've just outsourced it.

Except that companies start because they think it will save them money, right to the point where they realise it won’t when they are asked to buy these automation tools and/or train their people to use them. Oh how I laugh when I explain this to them with a straight face.

DevOps is historically an open source movement, and other than cloud IaaS or PaaS, we don't pay for much. Look at CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape to see related products, the vast majority of which are free.

As someone implementing a DevOps support model at the moment, you know nuffink about me.

I’ve fought hard for Enterprise Terraform and Docker for my teams. Much harder than I should have done.

Ha! It's nice you're giving them money, but I honestly don't know anyone who pays for these things. Use, GKE, Gitlab OSS, and OSS terraform and call it a day.

 

[cojak]

DevOps is historically an open source movement, and other than cloud IaaS or PaaS, we don't pay for much. Look at CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape to see related products, the vast majority of which are free.



Ha! It's nice you're giving them money, but I honestly don't know anyone who pays for these things. Use, GKE, Gitlab OSS, and OSS terraform and call it a day.

Missed the words ‘support’ and ‘enterprise’ then did we?

When you have business (and more) critical systems that people are depending on 24x7 with a less than 4hr SLA for P1’s, you need more than the goodwill of the open source community to see you right...

 

[fool]

Missed the words ‘support’ and ‘enterprise’ then did we?

When you have business (and more) critical systems that people are depending on 24x7 with a less than 4hr SLA for P1’s, you need more than the goodwill of the open source community to see you right...

I've supported systems with billions in revenue, critical national infrastructure and cloud providers. Heard it all before, you still don't need this.

Your support is the guys on the ground, your cloud provider and maybe your distro. Given that terraform is relatively simple golang code that just converts it's DSL into cloud API calls. Your guys on the ground should be able to debug this with relative ease, otherwise you don't have the right guys on the ground.

Docker is more interesting. It's just a wrapper around a Linux cgroup and you'd get support for your containers via whatever cloud PaaS service you use. You should also have your own guys who can debug this too, but you're likely going to want that cloud vendor support anyways, and this was part of GKE, so there you go.

Of course if nobody pays for these tools, the underlying companies go bust. So thanks for supporting the community, but I wouldn't call the movement expensive because your staff aren't trusted to read some code.

P.S. I've literally sat in meetings with a bank who were pretending to do devops and they've asked for all our tools so they can pay for support, so I understand how this sort of things happens and I don't really feel bad for them.

Also "Enterprise" is a bad word. The Government IT Self-Harm Playbook – Dan Sheldon – Medium

 

[cojak]

Well, I’m always prepared to learn.