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Most Organizations Are Not Fully Embracing DevOps (betanews.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Although many businesses have begun moving to DevOps-style processes, eight out of 10 respondents to a new survey say they still have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development. The study by managed cloud specialist 2nd Watch of more than 1,000 IT professionals indicates that a majority of companies have yet to fully commit to the DevOps process. 78 percent of respondents say that separate teams are still managing infrastructure/operations and application development. Some organizations surveyed are using infrastructure-as-code tools, automation or even CI/CD pipelines, but those techniques alone do not define DevOps.

158 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. We haven't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Most of our infrastructure/ops guys are in-house, but most of our development we send across the ocean.

  2. Marketing and operations not embracing MarkOps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Equivalent of saying marketing and business operations need to embrace each other as one. Yes there should be synergy and commonality, however they are different fundamental areas of expertise. Dev Ops should favor cooperation and collaboration not one person to do it all.

    1. Re:Marketing and operations not embracing MarkOps by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      In the old days devops was one person because they were simply a sort of translator between the development team and the BOFH, an almost-developer who understands system administration well enough to figure out what technologies are allowed that will meet the needs of the team, and what configuration changes can<->should be made.

    2. Re:Marketing and operations not embracing MarkOps by Idimmu+Xul · · Score: 3, Insightful

      im gonna throw it out there and say devops was just a philosophy of applying development paradigms, e.g. source control to infrastructure, producing the code as infrastructure movement and paving the way for easier continuous integration with the ability to auto-build complete systems from scratch on demand

      devops was never about merging the systems and development teams, ever

      --
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    3. Re:Marketing and operations not embracing MarkOps by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      That would have just been called "getting IT to learn from developers" or something, it doesn't even attempt to describe a new process, system, or role; just purely telling one side to get their heads out of their asses. If that is all it was, no wonder they got ignored by most companies!

    4. Re: Marketing and operations not embracing MarkOps by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      That was always true in many places; development teams include at least one *nix gnome to plan the app infrastructure, and the ops teams have development duties to build out the internal tools.

      The utility of devops was for when you have a BOFH, instead of a regular IT team. That can happen for good and bad reasons, usually bad, but sometimes there has to be a BOFH because PCI-DSS, or some other unavoidable reason. And then most of the developers act like spoiled children; they argue philosophy without comprehending that nobody at the bank cares, and you really do have to survive the audit. So the role of dev-ops was created, so that there is a person in the middle who can figure out what the developers really want, and what technologies that are allowed can get them something close enough, and then figure out what exactly has to be communicated to ops so that it is provisioned in the intended way. Or if it is just a petty BOFH, then they're a diplomat who translates the requests into Klingon, or whatever is needed to appease the clown.

      Some people blather about continuous integration, but that was already a thing long before devops was a word, so it can't be that.

    5. Re:Marketing and operations not embracing MarkOps by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      I suggest you go read The Phoenix Project by the guys that defined DevOps. You'd be surprised.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
  3. And this is a "problem" because ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... a developer should be modifying production code?

    --
    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
    1. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by supremebob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, not the developer per se, but the DevOps guy should have a process to promote it automagically from development to qa to production.

      If they do their job right, it shouldn't take more effort than pressing the "promote" button in their build and deploy tool of choice. For course, it never actually WORKS that way, but that's how the vendors tell me it should work.

    2. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by FlamingGuts · · Score: 2

      For many companies it does just work that way. The problem is many companies don't realize (or don't care) you need to commit an entire team or teams to building and maintaining your deployment utilities alone.

    3. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not really sure what the summary/article is on about. It says:

      "Although many businesses have begun moving to DevOps-style processes, eight out of 10 respondents to a new survey say they still have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development."

      But DevOps processes doesn't preclude dev and ops being separate teams, it just means that they should work together and use the countless bits of DevOps tooling out there to help support things like CI. It just about smoothing the path from dev to ops and automating it as much as possible.

      If the suggestion is that to to DevOps "properly" which seems to be the implication of the summary then it does indeed suggest that what they're saying is that there should be crossover between developers and ops.

      I work for a well regulated financial services organisation and that frankly just wouldn't fly. It's all fun and games if you're running shit that doesn't matter but for us, good luck explaining to the FCA that the reason you leaked a whole bunch of sensitive personal financial data was because Bob the dev configured the hardware firewall himself via Octopus incorrectly, or Jim the ops guy just did a small update that involved temporarily storing an admin password in a plaintext string internally in some application which got subsequently output in a memory dump on error on the public internet.

      There are ample good reasons why DevOps does not and should not inherently mean merging the two departments, and frankly those suggesting otherwise should get the fuck out the industry in case someone accidentally employs them to work on something that matter and we end up with yet another complete fuckup of a software project.

      It's sufficient to simply build bridges between and increase efficiency of the work dev and ops do together. Anything more than that is frankly nothing more than utter retardation. Let professionals do what they're professionals at - you wouldn't get the fucking cleaner to do their own payroll, so why the fuck would you get ops to do their own dev or vice versa?

    4. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It always works this way. The first time. Then different people in different departments fidget with the process in their on unique ways until the next time you go to deploy and everything breaks.

    5. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      Not even that. In DevOps it’s not even necessary to have a DevOps “guy”, that term smells a lot like the other drivel HR people tend to stick in job requirements. Originally at least, DevOps was more about process: a way for changes to flow smoothly, quickly and safely through development, QA, and deployment, with automation being a big part of that. But those 3 tasks can still be handled by separate teams like in more traditionally organised shops (ITIL).

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    6. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Beat+The+Odds · · Score: 1

      ... a developer should be modifying production code?

      Who do you think develops production code?

    7. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      For course, it never actually WORKS that way
      Of course it works that way.

      but that's how the vendors tell me it should work
      Which vendor? Since when do you need a vendor? Typical deploy chains are all open source.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    8. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by supremebob · · Score: 4, Funny

      I guess that you don't have "That guy" working in your organization ,who makes a poorly documented code or script change that breaks the build or deploy process the day before he goes on vacation.

      I thought that every organization had one of those people working for them. I think that our "guy" is named Bill. Fuck you, Bill!

    9. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by davecb · · Score: 3, Informative

      ... a developer should be modifying production code?

      Sarbanes-Oxley says you need two people to do a production push. One is dev, one is ops. The cooperation is called dev/ops. Whooda thunkit?

      --
      davecb@spamcop.net
    10. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No, in our company "that guy" makes up the 99%...

    11. Re: And this is a "problem" because ... by haruchai · · Score: 1

      "When a vendor tucks up. The company ends up getting discounts."

      Not always. I've seen more than a few cases where the vendors have talked senior mgmt into an even more expensive solution and longer term contract.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    12. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      Would you agree that the Ops guys will do a better job if they better understood what Developers were delivering? Would you agree that the Developers would write better code if they had the input and advice from experienced Ops engineers?

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    13. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by jrumney · · Score: 5, Insightful

      For many companies it needs to be harder, not easier to push into production. The emphasis should not be on the "one button" to promote from development to production, it should be on the well defined process that leads to that button.

    14. Re: And this is a "problem" because ... by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      The article is from a consulting company that sells devops solutions. Some marketing people got together and said, "What kind of article can we write to make people want to buy our product?" Then they wrote an article filled with phrases designed to make CxO types pay attention. The marketing people thought it would be worth the expense of doing a survey to get broader circulation. The point is, don't expect it to make sense, that's not it's purpose. It was written to attract attention, like a butterfly.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    15. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Wolfier · · Score: 2

      Even if both the answers are yes, it still does not mean individuals should be both developing applications and managing the infrastructure. Even in separate teams Ops and Dev can (and do in many organisations) communicate very well.

    16. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by superwiz · · Score: 1

      No, in DevOps there is no distinction between developers and QA. It's as insane as it sounds.

      --
      Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
    17. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      If departments need to be merged to be able to communicate the ultimate consequence is that organizations cannot have any structure. How can developers build applications for business departments if they are in a different department? How can business departments be separate if they all need to be merged with the development department?

    18. Re: And this is a "problem" because ... by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1

      And like a butterfly, it should be trapped in a net and pinned to a board.

    19. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 2

      Yes I would.

      But I'd also agree that dev and ops guys will do a better job if they understand any budget restrictions finance are under, if they understand any efforts HR are making to improve self development and staff happiness, the strategic direction the CEO wants to take the company in, the legal requirements enforced upon the company that legal regulate, and issues sales people are facing in the field, and the challenges the corporate security team face with people doing things that unwittingly cause a potential security risk like showing sensitive data on a laptop when sat near a ground level window.

      Improving the ability of a company to operate well doesn't stop at dev and ops, so there's no reason for it to be special, nor does it require any kind of departmental merge. This is as I said in my previous post merely just about ensuring departments work well together whoever they are.

      The flip side of that is that there isn't always time to learn everyone else's job. Thus, for every amount of time you get people to learn someone elses job, you're leaving them less time to become more effective in their own job, and if you have a company full of generalists, you'll rapidly get outcompeted by a company full of specialists, because your staff won't have the required depth of knowledge in their area of expertise to innovate and build new stuff to let you keep competing.

      So sure, if everyone knew everything everyone else does then everyone would do a better job, but we have to be realistic.

    20. Re: And this is a "problem" because ... by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      When you fuck up. They just fire you.

      The funny thing is that is typically both the cheaper and in the long term, better option for the company

    21. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Lennie · · Score: 1

      The process and having multiple environments is much more important than everything else. Making it easier to do so should just be a time saver after that.

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
    22. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      No, in DevOps there is no distinction between developers and QA. It's as insane as it sounds.

      Er No, Normally the developer will write unit tests, integration tests etc, A QA might write a bunch of other tests and get them automated into the pipeline and then the QA's will be able to focus on the really weird stuff (from a dev's point of view) that a regular user would have normally discovered at some point.
      The Idea is to get the testing done as early in the process as possible true, but there is still a good difference between dev & QA

    23. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Idimmu+Xul · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > No, in DevOps there is no distinction between developers and QA. It's as insane as it sounds.

      devops is just the systems team applying development paradigms to their jobs, moving from platforms like PXE/FAI etc to cfengine/puppet/chef with source control then all the tools that paradigm enables

      recruiters might have turned it in to a single role for understaffed, underbudgeted companies to underhire with but just because they call an apple a tomato doesnt mean it is one

      --
      The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
    24. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by FirstNoel · · Score: 2

      God SOX is PITA, understandably so, but still a PITA.

      My old job conformed to SOX, because they had to. publicly traded yada yada.

      everything was about controllership. to promote something to Prod it took a weekly group meeting, and when I left they did monthly moves, weekly and emergencies. It was becoming bogged down by meetings and schedules. Still didn't stop them from having critical systems issues, or stop me from getting daily calls at 4am.. It really affects productivity. Users ask for prod changes, for something simple, but due to the timing of the request it maybe a month till the next move because that simple change touches a user-exit. Meanwhile the users are stuck doing a task daily for hours, that could be eliminated completely It really saps a developer/support person's motivation. "quick fix? sure... shit. That won't go in till next month at the earliest." And a whole week of Regression testing out of your schedule. Which while nice is some ways, was always questionable.

      Now, I'm at a large private company. No SOX, but still audits and such. We have Emergencies, 4PM moves, nightly emergency, and weekly. Anything not process critical can go at 4, if it's process critical and needs to be in fast, it can go in at night during the 10 minute quiet window. (so it can't be a huge change), Anything larger and process critical goes over the weekend during maintenance.

      The flexibility now is a god-send. Less emergencies, quicker response to issues. We still have oversight, Users still need to test and approve before it gets promoted, and I can't promote myself, which I'm fine with. But with quicker responses, my productivity is a lot higher. I'm allowed to do my job and not have to justify every little bit in the change. If I make a mistake, it's documented for next time, and we move forward. There's no end-to-end regression test, which can bite us, but so far hasn't been. It's almost like if you trust your employees, stuff works. Let them do their jobs and get out of the way.

      SOX, I'm thinking was overkill, meant to reign in the bad-apples, and ended up hobbling publicly owned companies IT depts.

      --
      "Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
    25. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by davecb · · Score: 2

      That's some accounting/board/financials regulation. Where did you find the text related to operational roles outside of financials?

      I don't: my company deals directly in money, so financials are inseparable from what gets pushed. If you're doing software that doesn't involve money, you aren't required to use the two-person rule. You may wish to in any case, just as good practice, the same as doing PRs with reviewers is good practice.

      --
      davecb@spamcop.net
    26. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by davecb · · Score: 1

      I was actually commenting that even something clunky like sarbanes-oxley proposed something sane like dev/ops (:-)) Mostly because they are both based on some underlying good ideas like a two-person rule.

      --
      davecb@spamcop.net
    27. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      You can not make undocumented code changes.
      First of all: to put a code change "life" (regardless if for developers only, or for 'prelife' machines or 'test' machines or the 'production' machines) you have to commit it to a source code control system. And that is only possible if you give the ticket number from the issue tracker in the commit comment (of course you usually could give a fake one in so far that it only needs to refer to an existing ticket, or open ticket or ticket in state 'progress').
      Then depending if it is "just a script" or code meant for production, it goes through various stages of testing, promoting into an binary repository etc.

      Yea, we actually chained Bill in the basement to the wall. His girl friend keeps calling, but we pretend he is still on vacation ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    28. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Malc · · Score: 1

      Or your QA end up spending all their time tinkering with the existing corpus of regression tests to keep them passing as new features or other changes that break tests are added to the product, or even just investigating whether the failures are regressions or a valid change.

    29. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by munch117 · · Score: 2

      If you don't have a one-button promote, then you probably don't have a one-button rollback either.

      The one-button promote isn't the goal in itself, it's a side-effect of having a tightly managed configuration. You want a well defined process? When you find yourself capable of automating it, then you have it.

    30. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by antdude · · Score: 1

      During my dotcom days like in Y2K, we had SCM (software configuration management) handle this stuff with QA and production servers. I played as one as a backup when other members are out for emergencies.

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    31. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      But I'd also agree that dev and ops guys will do a better job if they understand any budget restrictions finance are under, if they understand any efforts HR are making to improve self development and staff happiness, the strategic direction the CEO wants to take the company in, the legal requirements enforced upon the company that legal regulate, and issues sales people are facing in the field, and the challenges the corporate security team face with people doing things that unwittingly cause a potential security risk like showing sensitive data on a laptop when sat near a ground level window.

      You just explained the reasoning behind DevOps.

      A big principle of DevOps is that you build end-to-end cross-functional teams, and that everyone is aligned to the business goal. That means incorporating other roles across the enterprise. Put designers, security, and product on the team. It can't be simply developers and ops. Build teams focused around specific deliverable initiatives rather than throwing things over the wall between departments. It cuts out huge swaths of hierarchy slowness.

      --
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    32. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      Did I say that they should be both developing the app and managing the infrastructure? You made that assumption. I intentionally kept both developers and ops engineers in my phrase.

      Sit them together in a common team, and they will learn from each other and deliver a better product. The biggest killer of good ideas is the pipeline where you lob hand grenades over the wall to the next team in the queue.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    33. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by ahodgson · · Score: 1

      Pretty sure half the web industry thinks DevOps means they don't need ops at all.

    34. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 1

      So where do you draw the line? do you include HR members to ensure leave can be booked/managed as quick as possible? finance to fix any payroll issues? the CEO so any required signoffs can be done ASAP?

      Currently DevOps implies you stop at dev and ops, but if the implication is that the only way you can get people with different skillsets to work together effectively is by merging their departments and giving them a retarded name then why DevOps? For devs the biggest challenge is always getting the software right based on the actual requirements, and that's consistently for developers across all organisations a much bigger challenge than any ops related issues, so why not DevBus?

      The answer to that is simple, it's that we just don't need it because different expertise remaining in different departments works just fine if you take advantage of plenty of existing tools and roles for doing just that - from architects who understand views and perspectives, to project management methodologies and practitioners who make sure the right stakeholders are involved in the right places and are given the right feedback and information.

      In fact, DevOps itself as I've said already doesn't even require any merging of departments - it just means good cross team working, using tools to support that where possible. It's only DevOps crackpots who try and take things to the nth degree as in TFA and as you're suggesting that believe the only way to can improve effectiveness is to eventually put every single person from every department and at every level in one gigantic monolithic team because that's the implication of your suggestion here. The only reason you've not stated it explicitly is because for some reason you think your logic only applies when devs and ops are involved because of some pre-existing buzzword that you've jumped on the bandwagon of without thinking the broader problem through more rationally.

    35. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 1

      "The biggest killer of good ideas is the pipeline where you lob hand grenades over the wall to the next team in the queue."

      But that has literally fuck all to do with team organisation and everything to do with bad business culture. You can fix the latter without doing anything with the former.

    36. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      Yet somehow everyone with pipelines eventually falls into that same trap. It's easy to ignore people that you don't have to interact with.

      Take the dev and the ops and put the 2 guys on the same team and the delivery pipeline changes.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    37. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      Currently DevOps implies you stop at dev and ops,

      Wrong. I suggest you read The Phoenix Project

      so why not DevBus?

      Read up on "BizDevOps" (which I think is a bullshit distinction, but there's a good intention behind it)

      In fact, DevOps itself as I've said already doesn't even require any merging of departments

      I never said anything about merging departments, that's the baggage you're bringing to the discussion. Jeff Bezos has a good principle here with the "2 pizza rule" - No team should be larger than what can be fed with 2 large pizzas. It's a good rule of thumb for optimum team size where everyone knows everyone else on the team and what exactly their responsibilities are.

      it just means good cross team working, using tools to support that where possible.

      Let me revise that for you. It just means good cross-functional working, using tools to support that where possible. When people are working cross-teams, then there are extra layers of abstraction between them working together. Conflicting priorities from their other teams, context-switching between projects, lack of visibility into other things in their pipelines, and the overhead of management to arbitrate between the two groups. All that goes away if you put the different skills on the same team and provide well-defined business goals for the team as a whole.

      I suggest watching this video from the CIO of Carmax where he explains how the teams are structured and the incredible time-to-market that they're able to achieve: http://forresterevents.net/video/2018/dt/9-0845-0920-mohammad.html

      Overall, your concerns are valid, and you're a lot closer aligned to the thinking behind DevOps than you realize. I think you're simply getting hung up on the words and preconceptions about what it actually is.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    38. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 1

      And therein lies your problem - you think that because you've always worked at organisations that have poor culture, that every company does. When you're working from that fundamentally incorrect premise, it's not surprising that you don't understand why DevOps is just meaningless.

    39. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 1

      "I never said anything about merging departments, that's the baggage you're bringing to the discussion. Jeff Bezos has a good principle here with the "2 pizza rule" - No team should be larger than what can be fed with 2 large pizzas. It's a good rule of thumb for optimum team size where everyone knows everyone else on the team and what exactly their responsibilities are."

      Okay, so where do you decide who goes and who stays? Scrum dev teams are already typically recommended at 7 +- 2, so the rule already excludes including anyone outside of dev. Thus, that rule actually counters your argument of merging dev and ops into one team, because otherwise it would be too big, much less if you bring business in too.

      "Let me revise that for you. It just means good cross-functional working, using tools to support that where possible. When people are working cross-teams, then there are extra layers of abstraction between them working together. Conflicting priorities from their other teams, context-switching between projects, lack of visibility into other things in their pipelines, and the overhead of management to arbitrate between the two groups. All that goes away if you put the different skills on the same team and provide well-defined business goals for the team as a whole."

      Complete and utter drivel. Those negatives you say are only true if you have an inherent problem with company culture - teams are only abstract concepts anyway, so any detrimental issues such as people refusing to work together are entirely tangential to remaining in separate teams. No magic happens if you stick people in the same team, instead if just means you have way too big a team that becomes unmanageable, or, alternatively, you say, reduce the number of devs to such a small number 1 - 2 where they can't develop anything meaningful anyway.

      To give you an example, you talk about context switching - but that's only a problem if people are actually context switching, people being in separate teams does not in any way necessitate context switching, ops people are perfectly capable of managing their time to focus on one thing at a time regardless of what team they're situated in.

      "I suggest watching this video from the CIO of Carmax where he explains how the teams are structured and the incredible time-to-market that they're able to achieve: http://forresterevents.net/vid..."

      Why would I listen to a CIO of a company I've never heard of when I already work for an organisation that can also achieve not just incredible time to market, but under tight regulation due to the sensitivity of our work, and with optimal security and quality too? I don't really give a toss how quickly someone can churn shit out, I care about how quickly someone can churn quality out. This is a classic appeal to authority argument on your behalf - I don't need to watch random videos because I know what DevOps is, how it works, and what it tries to achieve - that much isn't the problem, the problem is that I fundamentally disagree with the detrimentally narrow focus of it. So great, DevOps fixed their build pipelines and allow them to do CI or whatever, wonderful, but what use is that if they haven't fixed the problem of business and dev working together to get the requirements right? What use is that if regulatory and compliance requirements haven't been met? You've literally just fixed one tiny part of a much bigger problem because someone missed the point and created a term just for that little bit.

      "Overall, your concerns are valid, and you're a lot closer aligned to the thinking behind DevOps than you realize. I think you're simply getting hung up on the words and preconceptions about what it actually is."

      This is where I think you're rather missing the point - it's not that I'm not agreeing with what you're saying about improving corporate efficiency, and I don't disagree that there's a thing called "DevOps" that tries to achieve that. What I'm arguing

    40. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      And therein lies your problem - you think that because you've always worked at organisations that have poor culture, that every company does.

      You keep making hugely incorrect assumptions to fill your own inner narrative.. I've actually worked most my career in a DevOps-style model, in companies with good culture, long before DevOps was ever a defined thing.

      75% of large IT projects fail (according to both Gartner and Standish) and that rate has remained largely unchanged for the last 20 years.

      There is something fundamentally different about how startups work with IT than is found in large enterprises.

      If you think that difference is meaningless, then I'm sorry but you're the one who isn't understanding things.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    41. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      I know what DevOps is, how it works, and what it tries to achieve - that much isn't the problem, the problem is that I fundamentally disagree with the detrimentally narrow focus of it. So great, DevOps fixed their build pipelines and allow them to do CI or whatever, wonderful, but what use is that if they haven't fixed the problem of business and dev working together to get the requirements right?

      Again, you need to do some research, because you are wrong. You are narrowly constraining DevOps to be the modern scaling tools and delivery pipeline efficiencies, and while that's a part, it's only a small part. Don't feel bad, this is an extremely common misconception, and it's why most people trying to explain DevOps fall into the pattern of defining it in the negative (It isn't this, it isn't that).

      Another book I'd suggest, by some of the same authors, is The DevOps Handbook. It has the exact answers that you're looking for, organizational patterns, and also examples of major enterprises that have shifted directions successfully and why it worked for them.

      I tossed you the video not as an appeal to authority, but as an example of a large company that has done it, and the leader behind it doing a good job of explaining how it was successful. If you're unfamiliar, Carmax is the largest used car seller in the world (primarily US and CA market).

      I don't really give a toss how quickly someone can churn shit out, I care about how quickly someone can churn quality out.

      You keep making the exact arguments that DevOps provides a framework support, but yet you keep rejecting DevOps out of hand because you refuse to do some more research to better understand it. To me it sounds like your organization has adopted a lot of what is included in DevOps. If I'm wrong, and your organization is truly so special without being anything like DevOps, then you should go on a speaking and book tour and make millions as a consultancy because the vast majority of companies have not shared that success and are willing to pay for answers.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    42. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 1

      Um, some of our employees do go on speaking tours, so probably not the smartest riposte.

      Given that they've often done so in collaboration with major tech companies such as Microsoft I'd wager they're far more authoritative than you, so telling me they don't know what DevOps is when all you can do is point to blogs and videos online and the like doesn't exactly help your cause.

      Big tech has been keen to help financial services improve it's practices because many financial services companies have been slow to catch up with modern practices and tech. As we've been a leader in doing so it works well with us to support them so they can sell their services more easily to other financial services companies, and in turn they make changes for us in some of their offerings to support that - we were instrumental for example in getting Microsoft to build some additional data centres in the UK.

    43. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      And my company also goes on speaking tours (in fact, I'm speaking at a conference next month on the subject). We also do a LOT of work in this space and are currently transforming culture and operations at several major global banks. So yes, we know the financial space (in addition to all the other industries we service). We're also a major Microsoft partner (our CEO and Satya Nadella make global announcements together). Get off your fixation on appeals to authority.

      I'm not giving you examples to discredit your company or work that you've done. I'm giving you examples so you can further your own understanding and clear some misconceptions. There's a lot of misunderstanding around DevOps, and that's largely because the founders have done a poor job of defining it.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    44. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Xest · · Score: 1

      Wow, so after all that, after you made an absolute fool of yourself all you could come back with is accusing me of appeals to authority when that's been your entire basis of your argument?

      You really don't like being wrong about things do you? I'm not surprised though, as that's basically what shit peddlers like you do for a living.

    45. Re:And this is a "problem" because ... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      Wow - personal attacks because I try to be helpful and provide you materials to learn from? And name calling? Who's the fool?

      You've completely blown things out of proportion.

      Again, I NEVER used an appeal to authority. If I did, I would have laid out my experience and my company's work up front... like you did in your last dismissive claim.

      I've only tried to give you the tools to learn, teach yourself, and break some misconceptions that you've expressed as fact. What you do with those is up to you.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
  4. So... by war4peace · · Score: 2

    Why do they HAVE to commit to DevOps methodology?

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
    1. Re:So... by lactose99 · · Score: 1

      Agreed. Some parts of DevOps work well for many companies, not every line-item is a sure-fit everywhere.

      --
      Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
    2. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Same reason we HAVE to commit to NoSQL--because the PHBs read about it in a magazine and decided to not fall behind some make-believe curve.

    3. Re:So... by Narcocide · · Score: 2

      DevOps - essentially the practice of forcing your coders to also be sysadmins - works well for a situation where you have a staff of people where everyone can do a little of both but nobody can do either job completely competently.

    4. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Because companies think they can save monies by paying a single devops guy, instead of hiring a dedicated sysadmin and a developer. The result is a badly managed infrastructure and messy business code.

    5. Re:So... by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Because it is the stupid "hype de jour". DevOps does not work and cannot work, except when you have the rare situation where you actually have people that are good at both aspects and you manage to prevent them from being terminally boring by it, i.e. basically never.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:So... by jythie · · Score: 2

      Because there is always one best way to do things, regardless of scale or domain! Everyone who is not using the blogger's specific preferred process is simply denying the inevitable. We have consulting services to sell damn it!

    7. Re:So... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      I worked often together with DevOps and also worked as DevOp myself.
      If competent people work, it works.

      Incompetent people can cause havoc in any situation.

      (And yes, it is superbly boring if you need another CI server and the "server guys" can not provide one ... hence, you set up your won, and suddenly you are a DevOp, oops. It is so easy. Where the hate for new adequate approaches come from is beyond me. Perhaps you don't like the term ... then coin your own one)

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    8. Re:So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      In the company I work for, we devs are very capable, but ops are extremely CYA (Cover Your Ass). They don't want to touch ANYTHING. And that means running servers from 2009 in production.

      Oh and they lost the complete SVN server one day. No RAID, and no backups.

      But somehow, if prod breaks, it's the dev's fault for "not writing good code".

    9. Re:So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      This is what usually happens at our site. Ops doesn't provide us with test VMs as required ("just use the dev VM", which is already down to its knees), but they want full docs on how software should be installed.
      Gee. I have no idea what you're using to spawn services, dear ops. You haven't event told me what Windows version you're going to use. Because yeah, ops. You pull out a dirty old Win2008 VM because "licenses take time to get".

    10. Re: So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      I don't usually respond to AC, but you seem like a decent AC.

      I document everything. I even leave READMEs in projects for newbie devs on how to run a node.js with environment variables, and set SVN filters to keep them from commiting their credentials into the repo. Well, now that I am in charge of the new Node.js project and no longer in .NET.

      But, you see. Company policy forbids devs from installing software. Company policy also doesn't allow us to use virtualization (because we are a windows shop and management doesn't want to pay windows licenses for the test VMs). Your SSH point is moot. We're a windows shop. Ooops. Oh and btw, our dev machines only have 8GB of RAM and a 5400RPM HDD. "No SSDs for anyone in this company!" (ops guys suggested SSDs die early and, because of that, no one in the company is allowed to use SSDs).

      Hell, we are a Windows 7 shop. Our client uses windows 10 for some laptop. Some stupid part of our program doesn't work with Windows 10. We had to borrow the boss' laptop (only windows 10 machine in the domain in our area) and test there.

      I'm a developer, and I am 100% for CI. I pushed hard to get Jenkins running at our shop. It helped a lot with rogue nonbuilding commits. Helped ME a lot with "compiles with my machine" issues. Where it did compile on my machine but not on the CI machine (or the other devs').

      But there is a lot of push from management against it. They believe in "we'll fix it once it's there". They don't want a script. They don't trust scripts. They want everything to be installed manually ("so people actually check what they're doing"). Our install process is simple: an all-nighter where we wait until 2AM to start the upgrade and then still running DbComparer against SQL server with roughly 500 tables and 2000 SPs.

      And of course the client wants it running by 7 AM next day. And it's not working, so we get to stay until 6PM.

      Luckily i'm not part of that team anymore. In MY project we have rules. We have testing, CI, and database migrations. We don't do bullshit like the old team.

      Ops, though, still sucks. You talk like you ops people are all elite. Screw that. Ops people at my company insist all servers must ALWAYS have 50% RAM FREE at all times. The DBA, the only technical guy I actually respect in the company, has written to ops explaining how silly it is to have that rule. Free RAM in a database server is wasted ram. But no. Ops doesn't like to see the yellow warning on nagios. So basically he just has to tell the imbecile in charge of ops to fuck off whenever one of the drones calls in because "there is something wrong with the database server".

    11. Re:So... by hjf · · Score: 2

      I am a developer. I have no business talking to a superior of another area.
      I can only talk to my superior. He can then talk to that person. I may or may not be allowed in the meeting.

      This is how stupid my company is.

    12. Re:So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      You're getting it the wrong way. We devs have to work with whatever ops has for us. We don't get to decide.

    13. Re:So... by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      It seems painfully obvious to me; if you're suffering under a BOFH already, asking them to increase cooperation is not going to be productive from the development perspective, because the developers see themselves as the purpose of the whole shebang. Of course they're not going to adopt methodologies that require specific software support, that software will never make the list.

      That's what real devops is all about though; translating that divide to language acceptable on both sides, and maybe telling the developers what library they're just going to have to decide to like.

    14. Re: So... by Kaenneth · · Score: 1

      So how's your Blockchain coming along?

    15. Re: So... by RevDisk · · Score: 1

      While I concur your ops guys are either dinosaurs or morons, I can speak up for ops guys as well. We live with dev mistakes. Every time a dev team unnecessarily demands their app run as local admin, or dump its executables in weird places, or have byzantine config files, or have crap logging/eventing, or is so slow you know it has to be crap code, etc.

      Good DevOps requires people to be good at Dev and Ops. That's still exceedingly rare. Ops is the easier of the two, but not THAT much easier.

    16. Re: So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      Of course. This is not a competition. Just pointing out that no team is perfect. We have incompetent people in my team as well. But there is a lot of elitism from ops people in this post. And between devs and ops, it's always ops that has the "if it works don't break it".

    17. Re: So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      No MSDN subscription. Management says we're a company with a software development area, we're not a software development company. So change is rather hard to implement.
      As for docker, it's not really an option for now. I've pushed for it though (we actually have a nasty in-house service orchestrator that could be easily replaced with docker). Ops prefers monolithic native windows services. Easier for them to monitor.

    18. Re: So... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Find a better place to work, man!

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    19. Re: So... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Or you write an Ansible play book ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    20. Re: So... by RevDisk · · Score: 1

      No worries. My personal experience has always been the opposite. Apps was always the special snowflakes that got treated well, ops was the one stuck working holidays and terrible hours implementing. Not saying I'm perfect and I've tried to support with apps/dev/etc, but sometimes you're stuck being the bad cop or mean parent. "No you can't have X" usually means there's no budget or management buyoff.

      I have no problems believing IT can be arrogant gits, but remember, sometimes they're being forced into being the bad guy because they have to implement someone else's policy or budget constraints. Give them an extra benefit of the doubt. If they are being idiots, then they're idiots.

    21. Re: So... by hjf · · Score: 1

      Maybe. But there is no documented procedure. Ops will pull a vm out of their asses and it will have whatever OS and .NET version they please. My software is supposed to run in any combination they decide. That's just retarded.

      We also have a couple Node.js services. Running on Node 4. Node 4 has been EOL for a long time. Not upgrading it is just not responsible.

      Also infrastructure is a mess. We have thousands of desktops in this company. Remember that year that worm that hit last year? Well. We serve Telefonica. The worm penetrated OUR network through their firewall to Telefonica. It infected a few dozens of our machines and it was only stopped because ops called everyone and told us to shut down our machines. Because they don't want to deal with Windows updates.

      So yeah, fuck off little Ops troll. Go back to watching your nagios.

  5. Good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've literally never seen DevOps implemented in a way that's actually beneficial.

    It's consistently just a way for bad management to cut budgets by getting devs to do ops work badly, or ops to do dev work badly.

    Even where that's not the case, it usually just ends up being a way for ops to fob their work off onto dev whilst not giving them the tools to actually do it like giving them the admin access they need to install/configure something wasting everyone's time.

    I've even seen agile work and be beneficial more times than I've ever seen devops to be a beneficial thing. Like agile, it's just another fucking cult of nonsense most of the time.

    Devs and Ops already have way too much to learn, that's why they're specialists in their fields. If you get devs having to learn how to manage networks and servers it just means that's a whole bunch less framework they're able to learn away from being able to do full stack. Similarly ops have way too much to learn in terms of software and hardware configuration to be able to learn to program properly. If both fields were simple jobs with fuck all to learn then maybe there'd be benefit to it, but forcing each other to learn more than they already have to in their respective fields is a guaranteed path to failure.

    1. Re:Good. by alw53 · · Score: 1

      Why would I embrace getting paged at 2 in the morning? What an idiotic idea.

    2. Re:Good. by dentin · · Score: 1

      I've seen it work at large scale in exactly one place.

      In order for dev/ops to work well, a lot of things have to be done correctly. Most of it is culture and design of the organizations and communications channels; social engineering in terms of how the groups are set up and their incentives. Failure to do this is generally why dev/ops fails or doesn't perform.

      --
      Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
    3. Re:Good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > I've even seen agile work and be beneficial more times than I've ever seen devops...

      Uh what? Agile doesn't allow you to fix security problems that take more than one sprint to fix. QA, and demonstrate to product owners. I've opened a lot of bugs for SQL injection and CSRF, but since we couldn't fix them within one sprint, Agile requires us to leave those security problems not fixed.

    4. Re:Good. by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      It's consistently just a way for bad management to cut budgets by getting devs to do ops work badly, or ops to do dev work badly.
      DevOps is not Ops, it is administration and configuration.

      A guy who i snot able to administer a linux box, set up a CI system on it AND can not develop, I never would hire.

      Of course you have to know both (and many other things) to be a competent "software engineer". The question is, what will be your main work, but if you call to "support" because you have a problem with swap space, the CI/CD server, the source repository or artifact repository and are not able to either fix it yourself or nail it down to a problem an expert can understand and fix: you have no place in my team ... unless you are a newcomer and are there for education and learning.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    5. Re:Good. by sodul · · Score: 4, Interesting

      One of the problems with DevOps is that the term has completely become an overloaded marketing Buzzword that has little to do with the original intent. I wrote a long article about DevOps last year explaining that it does not mean a new team or role, but rather a culture between the Dev and Ops groups to work more closely together. The 'toss over the fence' model that is traditional with Waterfall is not working well when doing 'Agile'. Agile itself is often a pure excuse to justify 'anything goes without planning'.

    6. Re:Good. by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

      As someone who very very foolishly sat on his laurels and let my mediocre knowledge wane even more over the past 5 years, I appreciate your reply.

      The apparent expectations of system administrators, general support people appears to be going along the path of "if you don't know some kind of scripting, you're worthless". I continue to see things which seem to imply I need to be a goddamn programmer in order to get a job.

      I envy programmers, they're clever people, it takes a hell of a lot of work. I've been in this industry for a heck of a long time and managed to get a reasonable way, without ever needing to really code. Maybe an advanced batch file here and there.

      The industry seems to be changing. I don't know if it's for the best or not but it seems to me a whole heck of a lot more mid tier IT people are about to become either unemployed or bottom level chumps.

    7. Re:Good. by superwiz · · Score: 1

      A guy who i snot able to administer a linux box, set up a CI system on it AND can not develop, I never would hire.

      Unfortunately, people like you are not the only ones wasting organizations' money. Most projects which grow in budget and take too much time and too much resources are that way because they are ill conceived. Projects which are well-conceived require very few resources to maintain. But you, and people like you, grow in your influence because of your incompetence -- not despite of it. The more people depend on the work you give them, the more voices there are to support your way of doing things. While efficient projects get done, work seamlessly, and make it look so easy that they seem irrelevant. You are the way of how bureaucracies form.

      --
      Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
    8. Re:Good. by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Just because I'm *competent* in probably a few hundred things related to software engineering/software development, does not make me incompetent :D

      The rest of your comment, I simply did not get:
      Unfortunately, people like you are not the only ones wasting organizations' money.
      Why would I waste money?

      Most projects which grow in budget and take too much time and too much resources are that way because they are ill conceived.
      I don't understand ... what is ill conceive and what has that to do with my demand that developers have basic knowledge about installing/administrating a linux box?

      Projects which are well-conceived require very few resources to maintain. Correct. But that is not the "Dev Ops" job, and we are talking here about "Dev Ops".

      But you, and people like you, grow in your influence because of your incompetence -- not despite of it. What is that supposed to mean?

      The more people depend on the work you give them, the more voices there are to support your way of doing things.
      I usually work in very small teams ... 5 - 7, rarely more.

      While efficient projects get done, work seamlessly, and make it look so easy that they seem irrelevant. You are the way of how bureaucracies form.
      Are you sure you answered to the right post? In my teams we have no bureaucracies at all. You take a ticket from the ticket system, finish it, give it into review or close it.
      More simple it is not possible.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    9. Re:Good. by tbuskey · · Score: 1

      I've done sysadmin on unix like systems for a long time. One of my early jobs had 500 workstations and servers running many different Unixen. You needed scripting to manage that.

      I found that when you get to 30-40 systems, you must program (scripts, batch, perl, python, puppet, whatever) to manage it. Once you get into the scripting mode, it feels foolish to not use it, even with 10-20 systems.

      All this naturally leads to cloud, network, using source control to keep history, monitoring, etc.

      To me, the essence of DevOps is that I will get the call at 3am when things break and I can change the code/infrastructure so that call does not happen. If you're not getting the call from the customer (could be operations, real customers, users of your pipeline, etc) you're doing development. If you are not able to change development/code/process/infrastructure, you're operations.

      It's all about breaking the silos.

    10. Re:Good. by ayesnymous · · Score: 1

      Paged? LOL. We're already 18 years into the 21st century, please join us.

  6. I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by greenwow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    and this story is correct in that we haven't completely embraced DevOps. Our dev and DevOps teams use Agile so there's a ridiculous two week minimum delay for any fix since you have to add the JIRA issue to a new sprint before you can fix it. Agile doesn't work well with things that must be fixed for customers. Even worse is since most of our developers are on four scrum teams, they have four stand-ups per day where they need to talk about what they've accomplished and what they commit to doing before the next stand-up. Actually getting work done has suffered since you need to do something superficial each day for four times each day.

    1. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by FlamingGuts · · Score: 1

      Four times a day!? That's obscene. What a colossal waste of time. Even if the stand ups are only 15 minutes each you need ~15 on either side of each meeting to change gears. Assuming the meetings aren't back to back we're talking three full wasted hours per day on bullshit meetings alone. I'm so happy we've moved away from daily agile stand ups.

    2. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by greenwow · · Score: 1

      Four times a day!? That's obscene.

      The industry doesn't consider that bad. Agile requires at least one stand-up per day per team you're on.

    3. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      DevOps are not on a scrum team and are not bound to sprints.
      They handle tickets as they come.

      You probably do Scrum wrong, Agile wrong, and have no clue what a DevOps does.

      Not 'You' but your organization.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    4. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Agile requires at least one stand-up per day per team you're on.
      No it does not.

      There are dozens if not hundreds of agile methods, that have no daily stand up.

      And if you can not cope with a 10 minutes daily stand up, you are probably an antisocial asshole with whom no one really likes to work anyway.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    5. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by greenwow · · Score: 1

      Why do you say four times a day is obscene? If you're on four scrum teams then that is what Agile requires. Even worse are the multiple Agile ceremonies that they require you to attend per team per sprint that take many hours each.

    6. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      You shouldn't need more than 1 standup a day.

      And if there's extremely high priority work that can't wait for the normal cadence, then it should be a simple matter of the Product Owner deciding an equivalent amount of unstarted work to push out of the sprint to replace it. The point is to make the person responsible for the decision holds the responsibility for that decision.

      Otherwise you end up in the classic model of "we asked for a million things at once and it's the developers' fault for not delivering"

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    7. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by Dynedain · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you're on 4 scrum teams, then that's entirely stupid and undermines scrum. The teams shouldn't organized to be project-based, the teams should be organized to form a tight well-functioning, and most importantly, PRODUCTIVE group.

      One of the biggest values of scrum and sprints is to reduce the amount of work in-flight at once so that each thing can be completed in a shorter timeline. If everyone is on everything, then you're wasting everyone's time on context switching.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    8. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Our dev and DevOps teams use Agile so there's a ridiculous two week minimum delay for any fix since you have to add the JIRA issue to a new sprint before you can fix it.

      Wow, Agile is making you not agile. Good thing you are following the agile manifesto by putting people before processes.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by rossz · · Score: 1

      There have been occasions where I spent more time creating the ticket with it's description, acceptance criteria, and detailed steps than actually doing the work.

      --
      -- Will program for bandwidth
    10. Re: I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

      Four standups per day is no doubt a serious drag on production. But it must be supremely effective at reminding developers that they are factory workers with no status in the company and absolutely no self-agency. Which seems to be the main purpose of Agile Scum(tm) methodology.

    11. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 1

      Bullshit, but true.

      I work in a large company and the corporate culture can't wrap their brains around this. I'm on two scrums (two retrospectives, two sprint planning meetings etc.), even 100% allocated to the two sprints, and even more bizzare, we have the same scrummaster on both and she doesn't raise an eyebrow that I'm in both meetings.

      Some people are in three.

      Previously I worked in a startup. Agile was ok for me, great for the devs. As a specialist on a team of 1, sitting in a scrum of other specialists is stupid, but we tried to make it work and bent the rules until we got some value out of it.

      In the big corp, I surf Slashdot while in scrum... *of course* it's not an in-person meeting, that would upset the cubicles!

    12. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by Afty0r · · Score: 1

      Our dev and DevOps teams use Agile so there's a ridiculous two week minimum delay for any fix since you have to add the JIRA issue to a new sprint before you can fix it.

      That's not "Agile", that's Scrum - also within Scrum there are ways of providing hotfixes without terminating the sprint, and without waiting 2 weeks. Sounds like your Scrum Master needs some education. The Agile Manifesto literally contains "Responding to change over following a plan."

      Furthermore if you have lots of issues, you may want to consider a different Agile process, like Kanban, which is better equipped to provide rapid turnarounds of hotfixes. You may even consider a separate team for support.

      most of our developers are on four scrum teams, they have four stand-ups per day where they need to talk about what they've accomplished and what they commit to doing before the next stand-up. Actually getting work done has suffered since you need to do something superficial each day for four times each day.

      Nope! You don't have Scrum teams. I don't know what you have, or why you call them Scrum, but it is NOT POSSIBLE to be on more than one Scrum team at the same time. By definition.

      https://www.scrum-institute.or...

    13. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by coofercat · · Score: 1

      Your story highlights the problem with 'devops' and 'agile' and countless other buzzwordy programmes companies implement. Even looking down the comments here, half of slashdot doesn't understand and doesn't agree on what 'devops' actually is. We've all worked somewhere that said "oh yeah, we do agile, we do devops" and that's the example most people seem to accept as being "the correct one". Yours looks like a horrible misintepretation of what 'agile' tries to accomplish.

      For me, I'd say 'devops' is more about writing code to setup and deploy systems than anything else. If you're making manual changes on boxes then you're not really 'devops'. There's no requirement to do agile/sprints/kanban or whatever else - it's just about how you solve the problem of making a change. As an old fart, I've been 'devops' since I was ever allowed root. I've always used scripts to solve problems, and latterly those scripts are turning into Ansible/Puppet/Terraform or whatever, but ultimately it's all about the same thing - I describe how the changes should be made and some automation goes and makes the change on however many different systems on my behalf.

      Unfortunately, a lot of idiots seem to have heard the 'dev' part of the 'devops' word and assumed it means the developers and operations people are now the same people. That just leads to developers making a horrible spaghetti of insecure systems stuck together in production, or it leads to horrible insecure spaghetti code checked into the git repo. Letting developers do development and ops people do the ops usually works out better. Indeed a separation of responsibilities is an absolute requirement in most financial (regulated) shops.

      Just as 'agile' doesn't mean doing waterfall in two week chunks, 'devops' doesn't mean devs and ops doing the same work. Just as managers have bastardised 'agile', so they are bastardising 'devops' into their own image. Still doesn't make it 'devops' though.

    14. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by Paul+Carver · · Score: 1

      And that's a surprise, why? Figuring out exactly what to do should take longer than doing it. Spending lots of time doing the wrong thing because you didn't put in the time making sure that you have a complete and accurate description of what to do and how to verify that you really have done the correct thing is a dumb waste of time.

    15. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by RoloDMonkey · · Score: 1

      You should start looking for a better company to work for. No one should be working on four teams at once. That isn't "Agile", that's mis-management and understaffing.

      --
      Long live the Speaker Bracelet
      Rolo D. Monkey
    16. Re:I'm the architect on our DevOps team... by avandesande · · Score: 1

      kanban OPS and Agile DEV is a better approach

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
  7. So what? by mschaffer · · Score: 2

    The OP and article imply that this IS a problem.
    It's not.

    1. Re:So what? by Desler · · Score: 1

      But your company isn’t hip and cool (aka you probably have professionals instead of boneheaded amateurs running the show).

    2. Re:So what? by hjf · · Score: 1

      You're assuming because you don't do devops, you automatically have pros.

      I work for a company where we don't do devops, and ops are literal idiots.
      Security are also idiots. Their idea of security is the "agreement" we had to sign promising we were only going to use the internet for "work stuff".
      Then they ran for months a 4-server load balancing proxy with one misconfigured proxy. It was proxy lottery. Any request going through the bad proxy didn't go through. They had to hire an external company to fix it. Because yeah, devs are supposed to fix everything by themselves. Ops are supposed to call vendor support every time.

  8. Because they need to do agile devops by sandbagger · · Score: 2

    The only reason why it's not working is because you. It's your fault.
    Fortunately, we can hire consultants to help you.

    --
    ---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
  9. Right. by nightfire-unique · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ok - so here's the thing. Developers should have a firm understanding of OS maintenance, firewalls, networking, security, and all that good stuff. Operators should know how to code. I wouldn't personally hire a developer whose workstation was a disaster area, and I wouldn't hire an prod-level operator who didn't know, at least in passing, a few languages.

    But this whole "devops" thing is kind of a joke when you get to the enterprise level. The goals of developers and operators are simply different, and the stakes are way too high to encourage those who write the code to also run the code.

    On the other hand, if you're a small team / company slapping together a simple web site, multitasking may simply be a necessity.

    --
    A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
    1. Re:Right. by vux984 · · Score: 1

      "Ok - so here's the thing. Developers should have a firm understanding of OS maintenance, firewalls, networking, security, and all that good stuff. Operators should know how to code. I wouldn't personally hire a developer whose workstation was a disaster area, and I wouldn't hire an prod-level operator who didn't know, at least in passing, a few languages."

      Well said.

      "But this whole "devops" thing is kind of a joke when you get to the enterprise level. The goals of developers and operators are simply different, and the stakes are way too high to encourage those who write the code to also run the code."

      I think at the enterprise level, 'devops' really becomes it's own thing that sits between the dedicated developers and dedicated ops teams and bridges them; automating and managing the movement of code from one to the other.

    2. Re:Right. by Desler · · Score: 1

      Developers should have a firm understanding of OS maintenance, firewalls, networking, security, and all that good stuff.

      What a silly requirement. If I’m a developer, for example, of a non-linear video editor or CAD software why would that entail needing to know about OS maintenance, firewalls and networking? What benefit does that bring to my work?

    3. Re:Right. by Peter+P+Peters · · Score: 1

      Ok - so here's the thing. Developers should have a firm understanding of OS maintenance, firewalls, networking, security, and all that good stuff.

      What is this 2003? Devops is usually used in web services/microservices/cloud type environments where you don't care about that stuff. Infra is so last decade, have you heard of AWS or Azure?

  10. What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

    Is the ones who decree a switch to an agile development process, but still want waterfall style year+ schedules.

    1. Re:What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

      In that case, you make the issue a feature instead of a story and then break it down into several one sprint stories.

    2. Re:What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

      You can always beak it down into something that can be fixed, tested, and demoed in one sprint:

      1. Pick one part of the system that not behaving properly, even if changing that one part's behavior doesn't fully solve the bug.
      2. Write test case for the part the fails due to the incorrect behavior
      3. Develop a change for that one part's behavior so it now passes the test case.
      4. Test that the part now passes the test case.
      5. Demo to the product managers that the part used to fail the test case and now passes the test case.

      Next sprint you repeat the process for the next part of the system that is not behaving properly. Eventually all the part changes will combine to fix the bug, allowing you to close the feature.

    3. Re:What kills me... by hjf · · Score: 1

      Ah yes, waterfall. The rosy world of product managers where everything goes within their schedules. Where the dev is dumb, and needs a step by step use case made by the queens of the office, the analysts (all women at my company. VERY bright girls i have to admit).

      But an external consultant suggested we switch to agile. So now we devs just get told over an email what to do. Because that's how agile works right?

      Do i have to say this only lasted for a couple of months?

    4. Re:What kills me... by rossz · · Score: 1

      6, Go back to step 1 and work on the first of the 99 bugs you introduced with your fix.

      --
      -- Will program for bandwidth
    5. Re:What kills me... by jezwel · · Score: 1

      This is how I'm getting a new system built, where we "don't have sufficient skilled resources" to design and code what needs doing to meet my (admittedly fairly ambiguous and ambitious) requirements.
      I have no programming or DB skills, nor can I see everything that's available to work with, but I'm slowly chipping away through small incremental improvements that *can* be done by our less skilled - and available - resources.

    6. Re:What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

      We call it Agilefall, as it combines the worse features of both systems with none of the benefits of either.

    7. Re:What kills me... by brantondaveperson · · Score: 1

      There must be a duration for which the above isn't true. You can't do it in a day, for instance.

      What makes a two-week sprint so magical that all tasks, when broken down as you describe, can fit into it?

    8. Re:What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

      Agile doesn't dictate the size of a sprint. You should pick a sprint size that works for your particular organization.

    9. Re:What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

      If changing one part of your system breaks 99 others, that's because your company sucks at software and doesn't know how to properly encapsulate.

    10. Re:What kills me... by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 1

      If the defective system still passed all the "regular" testcases, then the new one isn't unnecessary, as your existing coverage isn't sufficient to detect the defect.

  11. Is 6/14 June Fools Day? by vtcodger · · Score: 2

    Am I the only one to whom This whole thread seems somewhat like reading a transcript of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party?

    --
    You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    1. Re:Is 6/14 June Fools Day? by careysub · · Score: 1

      No, you are not!

      --
      Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
  12. Because people with both skills are more expensive by ffkom · · Score: 1

    Given how eager corporations are to hire the least expensive people, it would be surprising if they embraced paying for people with both developer and operator skills.

    And "buy one, get one free" just doesn't work here.

  13. Devops has its place but it is not the holy grail by Jagungal · · Score: 1

    Devops has it's place for in house development where produciton and infrastructure are linked. There it is an effective and efficient way to go from Dev to test and into production.

    What does my head in is the number of vendors that we see that try to bring their devops mentaility in house for the applications that they provide. They expect that we have to mirror their development environment which is often an untested disaster over and over again.

  14. Someone doesn't understand engineering by davecb · · Score: 1

    I build the train, I drive the train. Occasionally it breaks and I fix the train.

    --
    davecb@spamcop.net
    1. Re:Someone doesn't understand engineering by superwiz · · Score: 1

      And a plane.

      --
      Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
  15. I don't believe in DevOps by PhunkySchtuff · · Score: 1

    I know plenty of developers, and even more operations / administration people.
    The skillset for one is not necessarily applicable to the other.

    Some of the best developers I know, I wouldn't trust them to set up a basic PC for me, I've seen the mess they made of theirs. Some of the best operations people I know can't write code that's anywhere near the quality of a full time developer, but they can definitely set up a secure firewall, or configure a bunch of servers to work reliably.

    1. Re:I don't believe in DevOps by rossz · · Score: 2

      That's me on the ops side. I suck at php. I know this. You do not want me working on the application. I'll fuck it up.

      On the other hand, I excel at scripting automation for servers. I live in bash and will almost always code a better automation script than the developers. I'll worry about getting the web server optimized, keeping it backed up, and simplifying the release process. Let the developers worry about optimizing their code. On occasion, we'll work together when the situation requires a look from both perspectives.

      DevOps is a middle managers wet dream to eliminate a bunch of jobs. Unfortunately, the job ads all tout DevOps. True sysadmin positions are becoming rarer each day.

      --
      -- Will program for bandwidth
    2. Re:I don't believe in DevOps by Peter+P+Peters · · Score: 1

      Some of the best developers I know, I wouldn't trust them to set up a basic PC for me.

      In Web services land you don't need to know how to setup a PC. IaaS and Paas has eliminated the needs for these skills (unless you work at an IaaS or PaaS provider.

  16. Doesn't surprise me by maiden_taiwan · · Score: 1

    As a developer, I "get it" that writing code to roll up VMs, firewalls, and so on results in repeatable software. But honestly, it's boring. I hate writing code to create Amazon EC2 instances on the fly, etc. I wish I had an Ops staff to handle these tasks.

  17. Hammers and nails by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 1

    When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    If you're a programmer, you naturally want to use programming to configure systems. But that's not always the best way to do it. There are other, better tools for general-purpose system setup.

    If you have to configure lots of systems in exactly the same, or similar ways, DevOps might be good. But for systems that are one-offs (and there are a lot of them), not so much. The benefits of automation isn't worth the cost in these cases.

    1. Re: Hammers and nails by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

      It does seem like a pain in the butt to automate provisioning and deployment of a one-off system. Until something bad happens, and you need to rebuild that system in 5 minutes. Then you're really glad you did it.

  18. where's the apps apping apps LUDDITE guy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Devops Devopping devops, only LUDDITES don't devop their devops!

  19. We automate the requirement for peer review by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Automagically usually means no peer review

    We used the setting in GitHub to automatically require peer review before a change can be merged. That's the only reason we now have peer review consistently. It was spotty until we made it an automatic requirement.

  20. Re: Good-The Cloud by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

    Yup. At many companies "devops" means ops/sysadmin without hardware. The old school ops guys might rack up a new server. The devops equivalent is writing some HCL and letting Terraform spin up cloud resources.

  21. There is DevOps and DevOps by jurtax · · Score: 1

    DevOps initial aim was indeed to have Dev and Ops working hand in hand using the same workflows and development techniques. The article is spot on. Unfortunately, "DevOps" engineer nowadays is more often the new name for "Sysadmin who does some automation". The "I do some Puppet, I am DevOps" syndrome.

  22. Why the hate for DevOps? by skovnymfe · · Score: 1

    I see so many people complaining about devops and I don't understand why? "Herp Derp developers writing code in production" - no dumbass, that has nothing to do with devops. Devops is just your ops guys using developer tools to streamline testing and deployment.

    Tools like Docker, where your entire platform is defined and described in a configuration file. All the required firewall ports are clearly stated, the number of replicas of each deployed service is clearly stated, the build process is clearly stated. The whole thing is just so fucking ops friendly it has nothing to do with developers writing production code. If you don't even know this much what the fuck are you even doing in this business anyway? Get out you archaic pieces of shit.

    1. Re:Why the hate for DevOps? by superwiz · · Score: 1

      Using Docker if you are not a developer who can read through some of its code is an automatic security threat. Try compiling it with the network wire pulled out.

      Oh, and DevOps existed long before Docker existed. It's not limited to orchestration. In fact, if you think all developers have to deal with orchestration issues, you are a buffoon.

      --
      Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
    2. Re:Why the hate for DevOps? by skovnymfe · · Score: 1

      Using Docker if you are not a developer who can read through some of its code is an automatic security threat.

      Well geez, they'll just have to get in line behind every other software product ever.

    3. Re:Why the hate for DevOps? by superwiz · · Score: 1

      Except Docker is trying to have it both ways. You can't compile it off line and it wants people to have the assurances that its auto-audited by being open source. Which makes it less secure than most closed-source projects.

      --
      Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
  23. It's not Devs doing Ops by sad_ · · Score: 1

    DevOps is not about devs doing ops work, it's not about a dev installing a server, setting up firewall rules by hand with iptables and managing the disks on the server. It's about enabling devs to do their work without depending on ops, among other things. The whole devops movement is based on the CLAMS model, where the 'C' stands for Culture, and it is an important part, because without a change in mindset, you will mostly never succeed on implementing devops. It's also the most difficult thing to do, changing peoples mindset takes a long time.

    --
    On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
    1. Re:It's not Devs doing Ops by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

      Basically, that's letting devs fuck up their computers (hopefully not production servers), or, for the most skilled, install an working environment that looks nothing like production. That's usually how things work when the ops team is AWOL, and it's terrible.

      Judging by all the comments, no one knows what DevOps means, it it means anything at all.

  24. Dogs & Cats Living Together by konohitowa · · Score: 1

    Oh noes! Whatever shall we do?!

    Sounds like the marketing ramp up to a lucrative round of “DevOps and Why You Can’t Live Without It” consulting gigs.

  25. Why would they? by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    Most don't need to. DevOps is this newfangled thing that happens when you've got your pipeline optimized so far that a handful of experts can code, deploy, upgrade and maintain your appstack all at the same time, while sipping lattes and playing a round of foosball inbetween. When orgs have gone "all cloud", then DevOps is a thing that basically happens automatically. But don't expect a regular old-school company going there. It's avantgarde startups doing this, and they, in the end, might end up replacing the classic companies - see the bets on fintech stuff as an example.

    It would be silly to expect than 150 year old insurance company to get what DevOps even means without knowing the context, let alone implement it correctly (along with the move to cloud) and ditch all the heads that get lost in the transition. It's way more likely that CloudInsuranceCompany Inc. will come along and eventually replace them as a company in whole. ... Probably even funded by the same investors that made money off the classic company.

    Outside of an organisation going all-cloud from the get-go, DevOps is little more than a fad and a buzzword that gets thrown around. Sort of like this "Agile" sillyness where 3000+ headcount orgs suddenly want to go "AGILE!" and implement Scrum across the board right down to the cleaning crew.

    My two Eurocents.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:Why would they? by Dynedain · · Score: 1

      Funny you should mention 150 year old companies not getting DevOps. Lloyds is going through a transformation right now implementing DevOps (among other things) across all their delivery groups and changing the enterprise from the ground up.

      They (and a bunch of other enterprises) are waking up to the fact that they need to model themselves more like startups to fight back against the disruption you are predicting. Because that disruption isn't in the future, it's now.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
  26. Maybe because it's stupid? by kbg · · Score: 1

    Anybody who has worked in any real software company with real projects and real life infrastructure knows that you have to keep the live environment and the test environment totally separate and the development team can't have any influence on the live environment in any way. Faster and more deployments on live systems only means more chances for failures and bugs. If you need rapid changes to the live system then obviously you haven't designed and planned the project before hand. Any automatic deployment to live system without any manual supervision is a disaster waiting to happen.

  27. Actually reduce people. That's why it's needed by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Handling outage on production caused by code defect:
    2 support people @ 0.5 hour
    2 ops people @ 1 hour
    1 developer @ 1 hour
    1 mid-manager @ 0.5 hour
    1 exec @ 0.5 hour (to keep asking what's going on)

    Total: 5 man hours during the incident.
    The after incident review is roughly the same, including preparation time.
    Grand total: 10 man hours

    Peer review: 1 developer @ 0.25 hours

    Where I'm from, 0.25 is less than 10.
    Peer review is one of the best ways of "gaining speed and reduce people needed".

    1. Re:Actually reduce people. That's why it's needed by Paul+Pierce · · Score: 1

      Handling outage on production caused by code defect: 2 support people @ 0.5 hour 2 ops people @ 1 hour 1 developer @ 1 hour 1 mid-manager @ 0.5 hour 1 exec @ 0.5 hour (to keep asking what's going on)

      Total: 5 man hours during the incident. The after incident review is roughly the same, including preparation time. Grand total: 10 man hours

      Peer review: 1 developer @ 0.25 hours

      Where I'm from, 0.25 is less than 10. Peer review is one of the best ways of "gaining speed and reduce people needed".

      This is a near perfect breakdown of time. The 0.5 hour from the exec and mid-manager is so true. There are 2 parts to the equation that you're missing however that get those numbers much closer to each other:

      1. Not all production pushes have bugs that cause outages

      2. Peer reviews do not catch 100% of those bugs

      The total equation ends up 10 hours * %ChanceOfBug less than? 0.25 hours + (10.25 hours * %ChanceOfBug * %ChancePeerDetected)

    2. Re:Actually reduce people. That's why it's needed by supremebob · · Score: 1

      That estimate sounds low. Where I work, we would probably need to have an hour "lessons learned" meeting where all of the above listed people would need to explain what went wrong, how they fixed it, and how we prevent it from happening again.

      And, no "Fire that Bill jerk who keeps checking in crappy code" is never an valid answer. This basically insures that we will have a repeat meeting the next time he does it.

  28. Trade school scale and domain by tepples · · Score: 1

    Because there is always one best way to do things, regardless of scale or domain!

    I guess part of it comes from HR evaluating interested candidates at a job fair, wanting new graduates' skills to scale from trade school/university scale and domain to enterprise scale and domain. If some best practice can be shown to work at small and large scales, trade schools and universities ought to be teaching it.

  29. My phone runs Android. Am I a Linux admin? by tepples · · Score: 1

    what is ill conceive and what has that to do with my demand that developers have basic knowledge about installing/administrating a linux box?

    The fact that you can't easily find a PC warranted to run GNU/Linux in North American showrooms. Buy an Android device or Chromebook, and you get Linux but no GNU (at least until Crostini becomes stable). Buy a Windows 10 PC and install WSL, and you get GNU but no Linux. Instead, one ends up playing hardware support roulette if buying a laptop or losing the ability to use it while riding transit if building a desktop from parts.

  30. Should use this as the summary by huckamania · · Score: 1

    But then it wouldn't have made it onto Slashdot.

    Still, I always enjoy seeing Ops guys talking in acronyms and trying to explain things.

    "See, the CGR/UPX used to do the job of the BYX/KbW but now everyone uses GTFO."

    It's like watching two '80s valley girls talking to each other. Fer sure!

  31. DevOps, summarized as C code by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

    strcat("Dev", "Ops");

  32. Git hook tidy by raymorris · · Score: 1

    I agree CONSISTENT style is more important than any specific style choice. Whether you want to coddle your braces or not, pick one and stick to it.

    On our team, we have a Git hook that runs an appropriate *-tidy, so when code os committed it's automatically formatted according to our team's standard for whichever language, which is generally the same as what most people use in that language. Write code using any formatting you want - it'll be automatically be made consistent before other people need to read it.

  33. Because a mix is worse for EVERYONE by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Because the worst possible situation, for everyone, is that the file has a random mix of PascalCase, camelCase,.lowercase, and under_scores. Every time you use an identifier you have to look at which casing is used for each identifier. Choosing ANY formatting style is better than not choosing one. Better for everyone.

  34. Re:Not DevOps market buzz word by Dynedain · · Score: 1

    DevOps was coined at and the community driven through Linux conferences. Not sure how you went from that to MS certifications.

    --
    I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....