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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.

15 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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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  2. 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 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?

    3. 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!

    4. 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
    5. 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.

    6. 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!
  3. 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 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'.

  4. 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 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.

      --
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  5. 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
  6. 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.