[chefandy]

I'm not dev-ops-familiar with Docker, so you might be more familiar with the problem space, but it seems like "You can just write a Python script to do what you want" is the sort of thing people say to justify not giving people the config infrastructure they need to solve their problems without having to write executable code. Like, sure, you often can make up for not having a zoom lens by walking towards what you're photographing, but that doesn't mean zoom lenses aren't useful to most, and critical to some.

[selcuka]

> you often can make up for not having a zoom lens by walking towards what you're photographing

Nitpicking: You can't really make up for not having a zoom lens as your field of view will stay the same. Hitchcock's famous "dolly zoom" demonstrates that quite nicely.

[chefandy]

I know— I work in film. The distinction is meaningless in this analogy.

[hamandcheese]

> to solve their problems without having to write executable code.

Some people would rather write 1000 lines of yaml than 100 lines of python, and I really don't understand why.

[chefandy]

It brings a new layer of complexity, which means more surface area for bugs and vulnerabilities.

It’s often easier for developers to write a script using standardized tooling than dig into deep configuration docs for a complex application you’re not familiar with, but that’s where the benefits stop. Configuring built-in functionality makes sense for the same reason using an existing framework/os/etc authentication system makes sense. It often seems like way more effort to learn how to use it than rolling your own simple system, but most of that complexity deals with edge cases you haven’t been bitten by yet. Your implementation doesn’t need to get very big or last very long before the tail of your pipeline logic gets unnecessarily long. Those features don’t exist merely because some people are scared of code.

Additionally, if you’re just telling the application to do something it already does, writing code using general purpose tools will almost certainly be more verbose. Even if not, 10 to 1 is fantastically hyperbolic. And unless you write code for a living— and many dev ops people do not— defining a bunch of boolean and string values to control heavily tested, built-in application functionality (that you should understand anyway before making a production deployment) requires way less mental overhead than writing secure, reliable, production-safe pipeline code that will then need to be debugged and maintained as a separate application when anything it touches gets changed. Updating configuration options is much simpler than figuring out how to deal with application updates in code, and the process is probably documented in release notes so you’re much more likely to realize you need to change something before stuff breaks.

[hamandcheese]

This is a hilarious take given the overwhelming number of outages that are caused by "bad config".

If you can't code, then yeah, I bet config is easier. But as a person who codes every day, I much prefer something that I can interact with, test, debug, type check, and lint _before_ I push to prod (or push anywhere, for that matter).

[chefandy]

Ok… so because config outages do happen, that invalidates the points I made? No. So, to use your rhetorical technique, that argument is hilarious given the overwhelming number of outages caused by coding errors.

I’ve been writing code for about 30 years, worked in systems administration for a decade, and worked as a back-end web developer full time for over a decade. I’ve dealt with enough code as business logic, code as config, and parameter configuring to understand that errors stem from either carelessness and/or complexity, which is often a result of bad architecture or interface/api design. The more complex something is, the less careless someone has to be to screw something up. Adding logic to a config unambiguously adds complexity. If you haven’t lost hours of your life to complex debugging only to find it was the wrong operator in an if statement or the like, you’re not a very experienced developer. That’s that. You can have all the machismo you want about your coding skills but those are unambiguous facts.

Developers doing their own ops and systems work have perennially been a liability for system-level architecture, stability, and security from multiuser computing’s inception. That’s why mature organizations have subject matter experts that take care of those things who know that a flat file of parameters and good docs is a whole lot more palatable when the pager goes off at 2am than a 100 line script the mighty brain genius developer made because they wanted to do it “the easy way that verysmart people know how to do” rather than learning how the config system worked.