[notanormalnerd]

So you mean, DevOps has made Sysadmins more service oriented and now instead of having their pets and being in overprotective silos, they actually provide best practices and proper platforms for the poeple developing the software?

[sisve]

Im not sure how former sysadmins feel about it, but from a dev standpoint, DevOps worked great for us. Making a clean cut on a plattform. Was my app down, I got message/called. If the platform was down it was the Infrastructure team / PaaS provider that needed to fix it.

In the old days we had so few deploys and a hotfix was something that was extraordinary. I actually had a board of something in another country approving that we where allowed to deploy. They knew nothing about the application..

[tryauuum]

god do I hate the "pet" analogy

yes this server is special to me. No, I cannot move workloads somewhere else and shoot the server in the head. Because customers are running GPU workloads there, I cannot transparently migrate them

[fragmede]

How does the analogy falling flat for you? GPUs are interchangable resources; an H100 is just like any other H100, even if you can't take a snapshot of an intermediate state from one and load it onto another and resume.

[tryauuum]

I thought about it and I don't hate the analogy. Although usually I'm very against comparing IT stuff with physical stuff because it tends to produce pointless conversations.

What I hate is the attitude of "treating your server is a pet is wrong, you should be able to kill it and replace any time". I feel like people who say it never run anything more complex than an HTTP API.

[fragmede]

Ah yeah I totally agree. Having pets is fine until it isn't. A single-digit handful is fine. 1,000 bespoke pets, way above Dunbar's number, isn't. Where exactly you run out of mental headroom and should convert is up to you; the point is that there is one and converting over should be planned for in the North Star roadmap of future development.

My (Raspberry Pi) home server is very much a pet, but I'm never going to productionize that thing, so I'm totally fine with it being a pet, despite the practice at work of having no pets, all cattle.

[KaiserPro]

thats how it _should_ be.

The place it worked the best was where a team of sysadmins were split up and embedded with each dev team. each devop would then rotate onto another team every 6 months or so. This meant that _we_ had to document our shit for the next devop, but also helped eliminate key person dependencies.

We would then have a weekly offsite where we'd bitch and moan about our teams and conspire to make things better.