Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reallydontask 2343 days ago
The main problem is that, in my experience, the majority of DevOps teams are Ops teams that have been renamed and refocused towards automation.

These are people that by and large don't want to code, not saying that they can't or won't.

To be fair this has been in Windows shops, where scripting has only recently (last 5-10 years) taken off, so you've got a lot of windows admins that the closest they've been to code is Batch scripting with a bit of Powershell. This is a big change for them

As it happens i read about pulumi recently and I've put it on mt list of todo things, but I can't see that I'll be able to sell it to our team and our team is blessed (cursed?) with three former developers

2 comments

> These are people that by and large don't want to code

I disagree. That's the stereotype that tool builders have of such people. Good ops people have always loved coding, or we wouldn't be living on the mountains of Bash scripts also known as "Linux distributions".

(Besides, people who don't like to code won't like writing tons of declarative markup either. So there is little point in the current approach either way.)

It might be a stereotype but it's also my experience, which granted is limited and Windows based, which as I pointed out in the previous comment hasn't been really onboard with the scripting experience until relatively recently

As to the declarative markup, for instance Azure Devops still doesn't have feature parity between YAML pipelines and classic pipelines, so while you could well be right about the same resistance to yaml, it's not, necessarily an issue yet.

Most devops tools are built on Linux for Linux, then ported to Windows later as an afterthought, so I don’t think platforms are much of a factor. It’s a defect in the production pipeline somewhere, something like feedback from potential users not reaching developers until it’s too late. It doesn’t help that, in some cases, vendors just impose what is going to happen, and the community is simply forced to put up with it.
> The main problem is that, in my experience, the majority of DevOps teams are Ops teams that have been renamed and refocused towards automation.

I'm on a relatively new team kind of like that (it's not a former Ops team but most of the team was pulled from Ops/DBA/analysis teams, and fits the description, and it's not a really a DevOps but more of a Dev+Ops team) and the general reaction of the team to being introduceed to the AWS CDK has been “we need to move to that as soon as we can”, even from people who very vocally never wanted to be programmers. And that's with, in many cases, a couple months experience with both programming and YAML IAC in the form of CloudFormation.