I had the good fortune to be interviewed earlier in the year by Viktor Farcic. I’m excited to see the book finally released. You can pickup your own copy of Devops Paradox here.
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Our interview is pretty wide ranging, touching on aspects of database administration, cloud operations, automation and devops.
1. Defining Devops
Viktor Farcic: Moving on to a more general subject, how would you define DevOps? I’ve gotten a different answer from every single person I’ve asked.
Sean Hull: I have a lot of opinions about it actually. I wrote an article on my blog a few years ago called The Four-Letter Word Dividing Dev and Ops, with the implication being that the four-letter word might be a swear word, akin to the development team swearing at the operations team, and the operations team swearing at the development team. But the four-letter word I was referring to was “risk.”
To summarize my article, in my view the development and the operations teams of old were separate silos in business, and they had very different mandates. Developers are tasked with writing code to build a product and to answer the needs of the customers, while directly building change into and facilitating a more sophisticated product. So, their thinking from day to day is about change and answering the requirements of the products team.
On the other hand, the operations team’s mandate is stability. It’s, “I don’t want these systems going down at 2:00 a.m.” So, over the long term, the operations teams are thinking about being as conservative as possible and having fewer moving parts, less code, and less new technologies. The simpler your stack is, the more reliable it is and the more robust and less likely it is to fail. I think the traditional reason why developers and operations teams were separated into silos was because of those two very different mandates.
They’re two different ways of prioritizing your work and your priorities when you think about the business and the technology. However, the downside was that those teams didn’t really communicate very well, and they were often at each other’s throats, pushing each other in opposite directions. But to answer your question, “what is DevOps?” I think of DevOps as a cultural movement that has made efforts to allow those teams to communicate better, and that’s a really good thing.
Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?
2. How to adapt to change
Viktor Farcic: I have the impression that the speed with which new things are coming is only increasing. How do you keep up with it, and how do companies you work with keep up with all that?
Sean Hull: I don’t think they do keep up. I’ve gone to a lot of companies where they’ve never used serverless. None of their engineers know serverless at all. Lambda, web tasks, and Google Cloud functions have been out for a while, but I think there are very few companies that are able to really take advantage of them. I wrote another article blog post called Is Amazon Web Services Too Complex for Small Dev Teams? where I sort of implied that it is.
I do find a lot of companies want the advantage of on-demand computing, but they really don’t have the in-house expertise yet to really take advantage of all the things that Amazon can do and offer. That’s exactly why people aren’t up to speed on the technology, as it’s just changing so quickly. I’m not sure what the answer is. For me personally, there’s definitely a lot of stuff that I don’t know. I know I’m stronger in Python than I am with Node.js. Some companies have Node.js, and you can write Lambda functions in Java, Node.js, Python, and Go. So, I think Amazon’s investment in new technology allows the platform to evolve faster than a lot of companies are able to really take advantage of it.
Read: What did Matt Ranney discover scaling Uber to 1000 microservices?
3. What does the future hold for Devops?
Viktor Farcic: I’m going to ask you a question now that I hate being asked, so you’re allowed not to answer. Where do you see the future, let’s say a year from now?
Sean Hull:
I see more fragmentation happening across the technology landscape, and I think that that is ultimately making things more fragile because, for example, with microservices, companies don’t think twice about having Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Java. They have 10 different stacks, so when you hire new people, either you have to ask them to learn all those stacks or you have to hire people with each of those individual areas of expertise. The same is true with all these different clouds with their own sets of features: there’s a fragmentation happening.
Let’s look at the iPhone as an example. Think about how complex application testing is for Android versus the iPhone. I mean, you have hundreds of different smartphones that run Android, all with different screen sizes, different hardware, different amounts of memory, and the underlying stuff. Some may even have some extra chips that others don’t have, so how do you test your application across all those different platforms?
When you have fragmentation like that, it means the applications end up not working as well. I think the same thing is happening across the technology spectrum today that happened 10 to 15 years ago, where for your database backend there was Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres. Maybe somebody who’s a DB2 enterprise customer uses DB2, but now there are hundreds of open source databases, graph databases, and DynamoDB versus Cassandra, and so on and so on. There’s no real deep expertise in any of those databases.
What ends up happening is you have cases like what happened with customers who were using MongoDB. They found out the hard way about all of the weird behaviors and performance problems it had, because there just weren’t people around with deep knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes, whereas in Oracle’s space, for example, there are career DBAs that are performance experts that specialize in Oracle internals, so you can hire somebody to solve particular problems in that space.
There aren’t, as far as I know, a lot of people with MongoDB internals expertise. You’d have to call MongoDB themselves; maybe they have a few engineers that they can send out, so what’s the future? I see a lot of fragmentation and complexity, and that makes the internet and internet applications more fragile, more brittle, and more prone to failure.
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