the social quandry of devops
Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@christine.website>
This commit is contained in:
parent
10a086d6f2
commit
e0fe1402cd
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,252 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: Technical Solutions Poorly Solve Social Problems
|
||||
date: 2022-03-18
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- devops
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[I just wanna lead this article out by saying that _I do not have all the
|
||||
answers here_. I really wish I did, but I also feel that I shouldn't have to
|
||||
have an answer in mind in order to raise a question. Please also keep in mind
|
||||
that this is coming from someone who has been working in devops for most of
|
||||
their career.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
|
||||
|
||||
## Or: The Social Quandry of Devops
|
||||
|
||||
Technology is the cornerstone of our society. As a people we have seen the
|
||||
catalytic things that technology has enabled us to do. Through technology and
|
||||
new and innovative ways of applying it, we can help solve many problems. This
|
||||
leads some to envision technology as a panacea, a mythical cure-all that will
|
||||
make all our problems go away with the right use of it.
|
||||
|
||||
This does not extend to social problems. Technical fixes for social problems are
|
||||
how we end up with an inadequate mess that can make the problem a lot worse than
|
||||
it was before. You've almost certainly been able to see this in action with
|
||||
social media (under the belief that allowing people to connect is so morally
|
||||
correct that it will bring in a new age of humanity), but the example I want to
|
||||
focus on is the Devops philosophy. Devops is a technical solution (creating a
|
||||
new department) that helps work around social problems in workplaces
|
||||
(fundamental differences in priorities and end goals), and in the process it
|
||||
doesn't solve either very well.
|
||||
|
||||
There are a lot of skillset paths that you can end up with in tech, but the two
|
||||
biggest ones are development (making the computer do new things) and systems
|
||||
administration (making computers keep doing those things). There are many other
|
||||
silos in the industry (technical writing, project/product management, etc.), but
|
||||
the two main ones are development and systems administration. These two groups
|
||||
have vastly different priorities, skillsets, needs and future goals, and as a
|
||||
result of this there is very little natural cross-pollenation between the two
|
||||
silos. I have seen this evolve into cultural resentment.
|
||||
|
||||
[Not to say that this phenomenon is exclusive to inter-department ties, I've
|
||||
also seen it happen intra-department ties over choice of programming
|
||||
language.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
|
||||
|
||||
As far as the main differences go, development usually sees what could be. What
|
||||
new things could exist and what steps you need to take to get people there. This
|
||||
usually involves designing and implementing new software. The systems
|
||||
administration side of things is more likely to see it as a matter of
|
||||
integrating things into an existing whole, and then ensuring that whole is
|
||||
reliable and proven so they don't have to worry about it constantly. This causes
|
||||
a slower velocity forward and can result in extra process, slow momentum and
|
||||
stagnation. These two forces naturally come into conflict because they are
|
||||
vastly different things and have vastly different requirements and expectations.
|
||||
|
||||
Development may want to use a new version of the compiler to support a language
|
||||
feature that will eliminate a lot of repetitive boilerplate. The sysadmins may
|
||||
not be able to ship that compiler in production build toolstack because of
|
||||
conflicting dependencies elsewhere, but they may also not want to ship that
|
||||
compiler because of fears over trusting unproven software in production. This
|
||||
tension builds over a long period of time and can cause problems when the
|
||||
sysadmin team is chronically underfunded (due to the idea that they are
|
||||
successful when nothing goes wrong, also incurring the problem of success being
|
||||
a negative, which can make the sysadmin team look like a money pit when they are
|
||||
actually the very thing that is making the money generator generate money). This
|
||||
can also lead to avoidable burnout, unwarranted anxiety issues and unneeded
|
||||
suffering on both ends of the conflict.
|
||||
|
||||
So given the unstoppable force of development and the immovable wall of
|
||||
sysadmin, a philosophical compromise was made. This started out as many things
|
||||
with many names, but as the idea rippled throughout people's heads the name
|
||||
"devops" ended up sticking. Devops is a hybrid of traditional software
|
||||
development and systems administration. On paper this should be great. The silos
|
||||
will shrink. People will understand the limits and needs of the others.
|
||||
|
||||
Unfortunately though, a lot of the ideas behind devops and the overall
|
||||
philosophy really do require you to radically burn down everything and start
|
||||
from scratch. This tends to really not be conducive to engineering timetables
|
||||
and overall system stability during the age of turbulence.
|
||||
|
||||
[What's the problem with burning everything down? Fire cleanses all things and
|
||||
purifies away the unworthy!](conversation://Numa/delet)
|
||||
|
||||
[Not when you're the one being burned!](conversation://Cadey/angy)
|
||||
|
||||
[Wait, so what actually happens then? Does it just end up being a sysadmin team
|
||||
made up out of coders?](conversation://Mara/hmm)
|
||||
|
||||
[Yeeeeeeeeep.](conversation://Numa/stare)
|
||||
|
||||
Yeah, in practice this ends up being a "new team" or a reboot of an existing
|
||||
team in ways that is suddenly compelling or sexy to executives because a new
|
||||
buzzword is on the scene. Realistically, devops did end up getting a proper
|
||||
definition at a buzzword conference level (being able to handle development and
|
||||
deployment of services), but in practice this ends up being just some random
|
||||
developers that you tricked into caring about production now while also telling
|
||||
them that they're better than the sysadmins. Two jobs for the price of one!
|
||||
|
||||
This ends up shafting the sysadmin team even harder because the new fancy devops
|
||||
team has things they can talk about as positives for their quarters, so people
|
||||
can more easily make a case for promotion. As a sysadmin, your "success" case is
|
||||
"bad things didn't happen", which means success can't stand out on reviews.
|
||||
Consider "scaled production above the rate of our customer acquistion rate"
|
||||
against "set up continuous delivery to ensure velocity on our team, saving 50
|
||||
hours of effort per week". Which one of those do you think gets you promoted?
|
||||
Which one of those do you think gets headcount for new hires?
|
||||
|
||||
This has human costs too. At one of my past jobs doing more sysadmin-y things
|
||||
(it was marketed as a devops hybrid role, but the "hybrid" part was more of
|
||||
"frantically patch up the sinking ship with code" and not traditional software
|
||||
development) and I was the pager bitch for a week at a time. Sleep is really
|
||||
essential to helping you function properly at your job. During the times when I
|
||||
was pager bitch, there was at least a 1/8 chance that I would be woken up in the
|
||||
middle of the night to handle a problem. I had to change my pager tone 15 times
|
||||
and still get goosebumps hearing those old sounds nearly a decade later. This
|
||||
ended up catalyzing anxiety that I still feel today. I ended up getting addicted
|
||||
to weed really bad for a few years. I admit that I'm really not the most robust
|
||||
person in the world, but these things add up.
|
||||
|
||||
[I guess "addicted to weed" isn't totally accurate or inaccurate here, it's more
|
||||
that I was addicted to the feeling of being high rather than dependence on the
|
||||
drug itself. Either way, it was bad and weed was my cope. It also probably
|
||||
really didn't help that I was also starting hormone replacement therapy at the
|
||||
time, so I was going through second puberty at the time as well. This is the
|
||||
kind of human capital cost when dealing with dysfunction like this. I've always
|
||||
been kind of afraid to speak up about this.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
|
||||
|
||||
- [ ] What technical problems does devops solve?
|
||||
|
||||
However, there are real technical problems that can only really be solved from a
|
||||
devops perspective. Tools like Docker would probably never have happened in the
|
||||
way they did if the devops philosophy didn't exist.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
In a way, Docker is one of the perfect examples of the devops philosophy. It
|
||||
allows developers to have their own custom versions of everything. They can use
|
||||
custom compilers that the sysadmins don't have to integrate into everything.
|
||||
They can experiment with new toolstacks, languages and build systems without
|
||||
worrying about how they integrate into existing processes. And in the process it
|
||||
defaults to things that are so hilariously unsafe that you only really realize
|
||||
the problems when they own you. It makes it easy to ship around configurations
|
||||
for services yes, but it doesn't make supply chain management easy at all.
|
||||
|
||||
[Wait, what about that? How does that make any sense?](conversation://Mara/wat)
|
||||
|
||||
Okay, let's consider this basic Dockerfile that builds a Go service. If you
|
||||
start from very little knowledge of what's going on, you'd probably end up with
|
||||
something like this:
|
||||
|
||||
```Dockerfile
|
||||
FROM golang:1.17
|
||||
|
||||
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
|
||||
|
||||
COPY go.mod go.sum ./
|
||||
RUN go mod download && go mod verify
|
||||
|
||||
COPY . .
|
||||
RUN go build -v -o /usr/local/bin/app ./...
|
||||
|
||||
CMD ["app"]
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
This allows you to pin the versions of things like the Go compiler without
|
||||
bothering the sysadmin team to make it available, but in the process you also
|
||||
don't know what version of the compiler you are actually running. Let's say that
|
||||
you have all your Docker images built with CI and that CI has an image cache set
|
||||
up (as is the default in many CI systems). On your laptop you may end up getting
|
||||
the latest release of Go 1.17 (at the time of writing, this is version 1.17.8),
|
||||
but since CI may have seen this before and may have an old version of the `1.17`
|
||||
tag cached. This would mean that despite your efforts at making things easy to
|
||||
recreate, you've just accidentally put [an ASN.1 parsing
|
||||
DoS](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/50165) into production, even though
|
||||
your local machine will never have this issue! Not to mention if the image
|
||||
you're using has a glibc bug, a DNS parsing bug or any issue with one of the
|
||||
packages that makes up the image.
|
||||
|
||||
[So as a side effect of burning down everything and starting over you don't
|
||||
actually get a lot of the advantages that the old system had in spite of the
|
||||
dysfunction?](conversation://Mara/hmm)
|
||||
|
||||
[Yep! Realistically though you can get around this by using exact sha256 hashes
|
||||
of the precise Docker image you want, however this isn't the _default_ behavior
|
||||
so nobody will really know about it.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
|
||||
|
||||
This is what the devops experience feels like, chaining together tools that
|
||||
require careful handling to avoid accidental security flaws in ways that the
|
||||
traditional sysadmin team approach fundamentally avoided by design. By
|
||||
sidestepping the sysadmin team's stability and process, you learn nothing from
|
||||
what they were doing.
|
||||
|
||||
[This is all of course assuming that at the same time as you go devops, you also
|
||||
avow the grandeur of the cloud. Statistics say that these two usually go hand in
|
||||
hand as the cloud is sold to executives as good for
|
||||
devops.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
|
||||
|
||||
As for how to get out of this mess though, I'm not sure. Like I said, this is a
|
||||
_social_ problem. I am a technical solutions kind of person and as such I'm
|
||||
really not the right person to ask about all this. However if you really asked
|
||||
me to give an answer, I'd say that you could probably get a long way by merging
|
||||
the sysadmin team and the development team. This sounds counter-intuitive at
|
||||
first. Something that would make sense would be to have "embedded" sysadmins or
|
||||
some kind of liason role such as "SRE", but this can only really serve to create
|
||||
resentment between people.
|
||||
|
||||
I remember at one of my jobs where I was on such a role, I ended up also having
|
||||
to be the tutor on how fundamental parts of the programming language they are
|
||||
using work. This one service that was handling a lot of production load had
|
||||
issues where it would just panic and die randomly when a very large customer was
|
||||
trying to view a list of things that was two orders of magnitude large than
|
||||
other customers that use that service. I eventually ended up figuring out where
|
||||
the issue was but then I had an even harder time explaining what concurrency
|
||||
does at a fundamental level and how race conditions can create undefined
|
||||
behavior. I think it ended up being a 3 line fix too.
|
||||
|
||||
I guess the thing that would really help with this is education and helping
|
||||
people hone their skills as developers. I understand that there's a bell curve
|
||||
and not everyone is going to become a programming god overnight, but every
|
||||
little bit sets off butterfly effects that will ripple down in other ways.
|
||||
|
||||
[This whole mentorship thing only really works when the company you work for
|
||||
doesn't de-facto punish you for mentoring people like that. If you aren't
|
||||
careful about how you frame this, doing that could make it difficult for you to
|
||||
prove yourself come review time. "Helped other people do their jobs better"
|
||||
doesn't really look good for a promotion committee.](conversation://Numa/delet)
|
||||
|
||||
[Yeah but what are you supposed to do if that kind of mentorship is what really
|
||||
helps motivate you as a person and is what you really enjoy doing? I don't
|
||||
really see "mentor" as a job title on any postings.](conversation://Mara/hmm)
|
||||
|
||||
[There's always getting tired of trying to change things from within and then
|
||||
writing things out on a publicly visible blog, building up a bunch of articles
|
||||
over time. Then you could use that body of work as a way to meme yourself into
|
||||
hiring pipelines thanks to people sharing your links on aggegators like the
|
||||
orange site. It'd probably help if you also got a reputation as a shitposter,
|
||||
usually when people are able to openly joke about something that signals that
|
||||
they are pretty damn experienced in it.](conversation://Numa/stare)
|
||||
|
||||
[You're describing this blog aren't you.](conversation://Cadey/facepalm)
|
||||
|
||||
Like I said though, this is hard. A lot of the problems are actually structural
|
||||
problems in how companies do the science part of computer science. Structural
|
||||
problems cannot be solved overnight. These things take time, effort and patience
|
||||
to truly figure out and in the process you will fail to invent a light bulb many
|
||||
times over. I think the middle path may end up being some combination of both
|
||||
approaches with a healthy barrier around people to prevent them from being
|
||||
crushed by the experiments.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue