The Cult of DevOps 114
packetrat writes "I was at OmniTI's Surge conference today, which turned out to be, among other things, a meeting of the cult of DevOps. Ars Technica covered the keynote and some of the presentations, but some of the best stuff is in the comments. Google CIO Ben Fried told the tale of a really poorly engineered trading application at Morgan Stanley that he was associated with, and how the way IT was structured there contributed to that engineering and to its spectacular failure, costing the bank untold millions in stock trade processing fees from its institutional customers. He said what he learned from cleaning up the mess has informed how Google runs its IT operations, and a culture that promotes generalist skills. A lot of how he describes Google's approach sounds like the DevOps kool-aid a lot of the other speakers were serving, but it also sounds like common sense — are most IT organizations really that poorly run that developers are totally unaware their software is sending messages that are generating network storms, or network engineers are clueless enough about QoS to route leased lines into their data center through their public-facing Internet?"
Cult of DevOps? (Score:4, Insightful)
The traditional way of doing things didn't work for 30 years. Why is it that when people are trying to make (and apparently making) a difference to how companies work, they're regularly denigrated by a large subset of the very people whose working lives they're trying to improve.
Haters gonna hate, I guess.
The curse of 'enterprise' (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been around enough to know that this 'new' 'DevOps' philosophy is just the way it always has been done at many successful companies making extensive use of technology.
I have come to associate the phrase 'enterprise IT' with those who *don't* work that way, and make their lives needlessly complicated. Of course, every last party to the mess will generally recognize it and know what could hypothetically be done about it, but only bitch in private about it and rarely ever push for meaningful change. The reason is simple, so long as it is a complicated mess, it requires a great deal of human care and feeding, meaning job security. Management can't force things to change without huge risk as everyone has sufficiently entrenched themselves.
Re:Cult of DevOps? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing the main haters are sysadmins, who see threats to their importance and way of working.
It's no longer desirable to have a gradually grown system. Everything should be built on virtual machines from scripts. You no longer need a wise old guy with a beard to change anything - who cares if your modification might trash the system? You can spin up a test instance, and dump it if it doesn't work right. If you have two apps that don't play nice with each-other, just put them on difference machines. The philosophy of a DevOps guy is very different to that of a sysadmin - you don't do brain surgery on a horse while it's in the middle of a race. Just shoot the damn thing, and send in a healthy clone. (Or would you prefer a car analogy?)
There was a world of difference between "works on the dev box", and "works in the production environment, without screwing up anything else". That gap is getting bridged by DevOps practices. OK, you still need people with sysadmin skills, but the way they work (and the things they have to learn) is becoming a lot more like development than sysadmin work, and sysadmins are not bred to like change.