DevOps: The spotty faced yoof waiting to blossom

Slow News Day

Slow News Day? Put another Double Glazing, Laser Eye Surgery, Solar Panels or DevOps infomercial

Do I detect a little common sense at last? I've read enough about Devops and been continually frustrated by much of it. The focus of anything in IT must be the business case, this means proper costing and evaluation of the benefits. Unfortunately this can be difficult and often IT offloads this responsibility to the business managers and then whines about it afterwards.

In my experience, cost everything, down to the number of paper clips needed. Where you can only estimate, do so and say so. Detail everything, send it to the business with caveats, if they sign off then it is down to them.

If they cut support or training or resource and it all turns into a giant mess then you have your piece of paper witch says "I told you so".

Devops is not about Development personnel!

its about Development processes (building updates into versions and releases, and deploying them). I am fighting a semantic battle with senior manglement at a customer site on this, and pointing out that Operations is also the process. I have been a Developer for my sins, and know how badly this will end if they are the sole driver of this.

And the automation is used for deployment of the versions and releases, to allow both the conventional and Agile methodology to be relatively painless.

"The spotty faced yoof "

WTF happened to the PFY?? Did Simon finally prevail permanently? Enquiring minds need to know!

Come to that, we are owed about 15 million BOFH episodes!!!

WHERE ARE THEY

Automation

The automation part of the Wikipedia article is there to suggest that in order to be able to do rapid development and deployment (which is really an agile concept, not necessarily a DevOps one), it is necessary to be able to do rapid and consistent regression and functional testing and deployment with minimal effort.

Unfortunately, automated regression and acceptance testing is good at finding the problems you've seen before. It's not so good at finding new problems. That requires time and rigor in the testing processes.

So, by reducing the testing effort to enable rapid deployment of new code, you're actually exposing yourself to unexpected problems closer to the live environment. To my mind, this is the single biggest issue with agile development, and by extension DevOps. IMHO, large organizations that have a critical reliance on their IT systems will remain with their traditional testing regimes, which will make DevOps difficult to integrate into their working practices. It's a Risk thing.

It's interesting that in several organizations I've worked at over the 35+ years I've been working in IT, Operations team members have been present during all phases of projects, and on the distribution and approval lists of the change processes, so communication isn't a new thing. It just seems to have dropped out of favor a bit in recent decades as IT has become more silo'd.

OK so one thing that's always missing with this is doing DevOps across company boundaries. Whilst internal or cloud based software is great, some of us still ship installers and scripts to clients who install on their servers; and no doubt some of you receive and deal with our .msi and .sql deliveries . Does anyone have experience of DevOps with a product?

"DevOps is a concept that we've all started coming across more and more in the last few months."

Well, it certainly feels longer than just a few months... and no, no regular reader of El Reg had any chance of not coming across DevOps.

fail to see what specific relationship DevOps has with automation

Well you REALLY don't get it then. Go away.

Limited sample volume..

DevOps is a concept that we've all started coming across more and more in the last few months.

Only in The Register, though ..

DevOps ...

Just the buzzword-compliant version of 'the same shit I've been doing for the past <mumble> years'.

Kind of like 'Agile' really means 'make it up as you go along'

So much is coming together all at once...

DevOps is smack in the middle of a bunch of huge changes happening in corporate IT. One of the biggest problems is that so many "new" things are all coming out at the same time. Public cloud replacing onsite systems, new cloud-enabled applications replacing traditional client/server applications, automation tools allowing fewer sysadmins managing more servers, microservices, containers -- and it's all happening at the same time. Now, like the article states, this new world needs more flexible IT staff which is what DevOps proposes to solve.

The problem is that DevOps is like Agile, a good idea on paper that is often horribly misapplied. DevOps can migrate to NoOps very quickly in a startup-style environment, especially with all the pushbutton deployment tools being developed. Same way an Agile project can morph from "fast feature driven development" to "no architecture, make up the design as we go."

Is DevOps a mindset, a magic dashboard sold to PHBs, or a religion peddled by DevOps consultants? Right now it's all of them -- I'm hoping it shakes out into a sane blend of these.

Okay, all well and good. But is it actually a proper thing or is it just a relatively young term that inept managers throw about without either understanding it or meaning it?

FTFY

Well, first of all I'll start by saying that I don't really like the second half of Wikipedia's definition: I fail to see what specific relationship DevOps has with automation. I do, however, get a warm feeling from the fact that both these definitions (which happened to be the first two I picked at random) both include the words communication and collaboration. So perhaps there's something in the concept

You must be lucky. What most people think of Dev Ops is Agile process coupled with the latest version of Chef or Puppet, with the goal of automating the operations team out of the picture so that the latest version can be shipped. There, we met our goal. Don't know what Operations problem is...

"I fail to see what specific relationship DevOps has with automation." Is the author being sarcastic, or just clueless?

DevOps is just implementing ITIL properly with a fast CSI cycle

The article explains what DevOps ought to be

but the reality is that DevOps has been confused with CI/CD by almost all agencies/employers now.

I'm currently looking for a contract - my expertise is Linux infrastructure/operations. Those contracts don't exist any more. Go to a job site of your choice now and search using the keyword 'Linux'. A year or more ago that would have given you mixed results; Linux support, Linux Admin, Operations, Engineers etc.

These days over 90% of the results are 'DevOps Engineer'.

Look at the spec for a DevOps engineer and it'll vary, but it's typically Puppet/Chef/Ansible, Python/Ruby, AWS, Jenkins/Travis etc. The role is generally "Manage the CI/CD toolset, package up the software for deployment, write the deployment scripts, do the deployments."

So DevOps is actually "that bit where dev and ops overlap which no-one else wants to do."

The issue with this is that it doesn't solve the problems that the real DevOps aims to solve. Instead of separate dev and ops silos, you now have dev, ops and devops silos.

The "DevOps" roles also put a lot of emphasis on the candidate being able code (and that's code, not script), so evidently this favours developers that, for reasons either good or bad, have moved from their development career into DevOps. They'll tend not to have (and the employers aren't looking for) deep or broad experience in ops, and therefore won't be aware of the niceties of how to properly apply the stuff they're doing in dev environments to production.

Oh, and for extra hoots, in the past week I've also come across adverts for TechOps, WebOps and NetOps. The future's looking bright!