[HN Gopher] DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either
        
       Author : CrankyBear
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2024-07-02 20:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thenewstack.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thenewstack.io)
        
       | tetha wrote:
       | Mh. One thing I observe at work is: Increasing what I call the
       | technical relativistic speed of deployments to insane levels is
       | either impossible or trivial. Like, we have C++ code in the
       | company with bindings to WIN32 APIs. We're not talking about
       | speed with those things. But for a lot of relatively modern
       | software, it's pretty easy to implement automation that can make
       | a fairly robust deployment take a few minutes. Containers make
       | this easier, but you can have the same thing with ruby
       | (capistrano), python (liberal use of venvs), Java and so on on
       | VMs as well. Most of this is just a bit of config management or
       | container orchestration config.
       | 
       | However, quite a few dev-teams make many very stupid decisions
       | and suddenly your 2 minute long deployment without downtime
       | requires 4 weeks of coordination with customers, because people
       | figured to include a breaking change in their API, opposed to
       | some incremental evolution. Or because people implemented a big-
       | bang database migration, which will take hours of downtime,
       | opposed to some incremental 2-3 step database model evolution. Or
       | they pile 23 steps you "have to manually do after a deployment,
       | but just maybe and not always and it's not obvious when" on top.
       | Or because people get scared because of either bad decisions or
       | dumb stuff just happening. Or because people don't understand
       | different rollout strategies to hedge risk and then they get
       | scared and then they don't deploy and then everything explodes
       | once they deploy a crapton of stuff at once. Which, naturally,
       | catches on fire.
       | 
       | The question of how to rollout a change smoothly, silently and
       | with little coordination seems to be an entirely alien black
       | magic to some people.
       | 
       | And from there, a bunch of our new applications and services with
       | less baggage actually become slower than our old veteran products
       | with loads of experience and really ugly baggage behind them.
       | 
       | It's just utterly strange to me that we are approaching a level
       | in which we in ops can confidently reconfigure, failover and
       | restart database clusters on git-push and some dev-teams are so
       | worried about swapping stateless code in their system.
        
       | hodgesrm wrote:
       | > "It may be that the ubiquity of DevOps practices has allowed
       | developers and organizations to increase the complexity of
       | projects they are involved in, counteracting the benefits to
       | development velocity..."
       | 
       | This. There's a thicket of projects and products to automate
       | software delivery that in the in end are no better than a shell
       | script. (And in some cases a lot worse.) Github actions are a
       | case in point. They are fine for relatively simple tasks but
       | generate inscrutable errors as the workflows become more complex.
       | My team has spent countless hours debugging issues when
       | dependencies change unexpectedly in runners.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-07-02 23:02 UTC)