The Death of Sysadmin
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@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
Pick a project on GitHub/GitLab. If they have a .travis yml, Jenkinsfile, .gitlab-ci.yml, bamboo.yml, etc they are leveraging at least CI. I don't think I've noticed one without a build file for quite some time.
Yeah, but that's why I pointed out that most projects aren't up to using Git yet. You are filtering out the most likely to have CI as a starting point.
Yeah I don't believe that, and anyway just because you're not using Git doesn't mean you're not using CI/CD.
True, but essentially no one moves to CI without code management first, it's so hard and cart before the horse.
You are looking at big, public repos and viewing the world that way. But remember, most development is done in languages like Java on old code bases in big silos where all of these concepts remain uncommon.
Ant, Maven, and Gradle are the building blocks of Java build tools leveraged in CI/CD. Its odd you would pick Java as a language that wouldn't be a part of that process.
Not really at all, as Java was popular and entrenched before those were popular. And bottom line, no matter what tools are out there, most developers currently in the work force were not taught those approaches (they were unheard of in university even in 2006) and went to work at companies that had never heard of them.
I've worked in new Java west coast start ups in the last two years that chose Java and had never heard of this stuff. Is it odd that they picked Java? Yes, but not for that reason. They were just "normal developers" without these kinds of skills, and they weren't kids who learned this as "the one way to do it" like it is taught only extremely recently.
It might seem like these approaches are super obvious today, but this is an extremely recent phenomenon. It seems so obvious that we feel like it must have been how people did this for forever, but it just wasn't. CI wasn't popular until XP made it so, and XP was still one of those "niche things" that people thought was a crazy developer cult well into the 2000s.
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Compare to system admin work....
By far the majority of people doing system admin work today aren't just not doing DevOps, they aren't even automating in any meaningful way. To all of us, this seems crazy, but we represent the 1%, we are the outliers. We are a self selecting group of people who take the time to learn things, get peer review, discuss, etc. Most people, including most IT people, don't do that. I do work for all kinds of companies, and let me tell you, even recommending something akin to DevOps is met with a "are you crazy, what world do you think this is" response in most cases. The IT folks are defensive because they don't think that they could ever do that, and management thinks it is nuts because they only want IT doing what they already know.
Even working in a multi-billion dollar hedge fund as recently as 2015, they were not yet aware of the RSAT tools for Windows (primarily a Windows shop) let alone PowerShell automation let alone DevOps. Yet they were quarter to a third of a million dollar a year admins working with the most expensive equipment and access to any training or tools known to man. But they just weren't pushing the envelope.
When we did DevOps for a giant 10,000 node cluster on Wall St. in 2006, it was so ground breaking that it was in all kinds of magazines as the first of its kind for the industry.
And these are shops that all write insane amounts of code, too, often with similar approaches.
But look even at SW let alone shops that don't get online at all. Those people aren't even remotely considering DevOps or even old fashioned scripting. Almost all just use the Windows GUI and, if we are lucky, the RSAT tools. That's reality. Average is a pretty low bar.
IT is the same as development. The average developer doesn't know "patterns" yet, and that was the "CI of 1992".
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And that brings us back to the OP. The world of system administration is so bad, because of averages, that even if every great shop in the world goes to DevOps, containerization, cloud, insert buzz word here, tons and tons of shops are going to remain doing snowflake work for decades to come. And the people who will be out of work aren't the good system admins who were great but otherwise failed to move into devops, no, it's going to be the crappy ones on the bottom that can't compete even doing GUI work. The bottom is where the skimming happens, not the top.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
Pick a project on GitHub/GitLab. If they have a .travis yml, Jenkinsfile, .gitlab-ci.yml, bamboo.yml, etc they are leveraging at least CI. I don't think I've noticed one without a build file for quite some time.
Yeah, but that's why I pointed out that most projects aren't up to using Git yet. You are filtering out the most likely to have CI as a starting point.
Yeah I don't believe that, and anyway just because you're not using Git doesn't mean you're not using CI/CD.
True, but essentially no one moves to CI without code management first, it's so hard and cart before the horse.
You are looking at big, public repos and viewing the world that way. But remember, most development is done in languages like Java on old code bases in big silos where all of these concepts remain uncommon.
Ant, Maven, and Gradle are the building blocks of Java build tools leveraged in CI/CD. Its odd you would pick Java as a language that wouldn't be a part of that process.
Not really at all, as Java was popular and entrenched before those were popular. And bottom line, no matter what tools are out there, most developers currently in the work force were not taught those approaches (they were unheard of in university even in 2006) and went to work at companies that had never heard of them.
I've worked in new Java west coast start ups in the last two years that chose Java and had never heard of this stuff. Is it odd that they picked Java? Yes, but not for that reason. They were just "normal developers" without these kinds of skills, and they weren't kids who learned this as "the one way to do it" like it is taught only extremely recently.
It might seem like these approaches are super obvious today, but this is an extremely recent phenomenon. It seems so obvious that we feel like it must have been how people did this for forever, but it just wasn't. CI wasn't popular until XP made it so, and XP was still one of those "niche things" that people thought was a crazy developer cult well into the 2000s.
Ant and Junit were released only 4 years after Javas initial release. This stuff has been around for a long time. XP was the end of the 90s. Just because some small Java companies haven't heard of it doesn't represent most of Java development or development overall.
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@stacksofplates said in The Death of Sysadmin:
Ant and Junit were released only 4 years after Javas initial release. This stuff has been around for a long time. XP was the end of the 90s. Just because some small companies haven't heard of it doesn't represent most of Java development or development overall.
Remember, when I say "majority" I'm talking the Fortune 500 which is where most developers are. That's a market that while generally good, has a hard time with adopting new tech and techniques. Those that have thousands or tens of thousands of devs on staff... changing that environment is hard and rarely done. The same things that make them use COBOL, Fortran, and Java in tons of their apps is what also makes them not adopt new procedures.
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Small shops, like the west coast, are the most likely to use the new techniques. That's where the culture and education behind it comes from, that's where you can hire people who already have those skills, and often those approaches are considered to be part of that culture and not necessarily widely applicable in other areas.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
CI/CD is also one of those things that is just "one approach" in both IT and Dev circles. XP made it popular, it existed before but no one talked about it, and XP was only popular in "what people have heard of", not what people actively do. The majority of developers don't use it today. And many, maybe a majority or maybe not, don't think that it is appropriate even today. Regular integration is important, but many people believe that frequest, rather than continuous, is a better approach.
It's much like test first. It is a recent concept, not an old one. And while essentially all developers and DevOps know what it is, extremely few adopt it. It's today where CI was eight years ago.
Are you referring to the Agile approach of working? That's not the same thing as DevOps.
Um, duh. Agile is one approach to dev, one that promotes CI. I think you just stated by point, you are assuming one aspect of Agile dev and assuming that all DevOps comes from one bit of Agile dev, which isn't true at all.
I think you are wrong here.
How does repeating what I said make me wrong? I keep saying that they are not the same. Not sure what you think you are arguing against. Nothing I've said in any way conflates the two.
No, you are saying certain things are one approach to DevOps. That's what I don't agree with. In your example, XP is not an approach to DevOps because DevOps is one thing, and XP is another. You can have DevOps or XP totally without the other.
You now normally would use Agile with DevOps as a team because it just makes sense. You can't compete without doing so, or you'll be left in the dust by other competing software companies that are.
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We still develop in VB6 and we use CI. I know large organizations resist change, but CI seems like a necessity.
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
No, you are saying certain things are one approach to DevOps. That's what I don't agree with. In your example, XP is not an approach to DevOps because DevOps is one thing, and XP is another. You can have DevOps or XP totally without the other.
I never said or implied that XP is an approach to DevOps. NOthing you are saying is related to what I wrote.
XP is a development approach that almost no one ever used and certainly have never heard of it in relationship to DevOps. How you think anyone here has associated the two, I have no idea. Not only did I say nothing of the sort, but neither did anyone else.
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@flaxking said in The Death of Sysadmin:
We still develop in VB6 and we use CI. I know large organizations resist change, but CI seems like a necessity.
It's not a bad idea, but coming from decades in software development before it even existed (well, one before it existed and a couple before it was popular) it is anything but necessary. I'm not against it, not at all. But necessary it is not.
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
You now normally would use Agile with DevOps as a team because it just makes sense. You can't compete without doing so, or you'll be left in the dust by other competing software companies that are.
Sure, just as almost all modern development uses Agile. But Agile != XP. CI != Agile. DevOps != Agile. etc. All different concepts. And sometimes even Agile isn't the right choice.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
But Agile != XP.
Right, XP is a type of Agile development... Where as they are not a type of DevOps.
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
But Agile != XP.
Right, XP is a type of Agile development... Where as they are not a type of DevOps.
Obviously. Why do you keep restating things like this as if someone said something different?
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@Obsolesce instead of stating really obvious facts that everyone knew and agreed upon before the start of the discussion, don't use these meaningless facts to imply something. State the thing you are trying to stay. You are beating around the bush talking about things that have nothing to really do with the discussion as if you have a point that you are trying to make, but since you are just stating obvious, universally accepted facts, there isn't anything to derive an implication from to know what you are intending to imply.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
But Agile != XP.
Right, XP is a type of Agile development... Where as they are not a type of DevOps.
Obviously. Why do you keep restating things like this as if someone said something different?
Because, the way you are saying things makes it seem, to me, that you think the opposite or something different.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting all of your replies, but my gist of them is that you and I don't agree with what DevOps is, or maybe you are learning and agreeing in real-time. I don't know. Maybe you are saying the things I am but in a less specific way and I'm not catching it. Again, I don't know.
But what I do know, is I'm not knowingly restating things you think you said or implied.
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
Because, the way you are saying things makes it seem, to me, that you think the opposite or something different.
The way that I say what? I've not said anything of the sort. Do you have an example?
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
Maybe I'm misinterpreting all of your replies, but my gist of them is that you and I don't agree with what DevOps is, or maybe you are learning and agreeing in real-time. I don't know. Maybe you are saying the things I am but in a less specific way and I'm not catching it. Again, I don't know.
This makes no sense since never once did you ever say anything that didn't agree with what I had already said. You just keep agreeing with me in a weird, aggressive tone. That's not the same as disagreeing, it's just confusing.
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
But what I do know, is I'm not knowingly restating things you think you said or implied.
Okay, but all of your statements are just restating things that no one has disagreed with with a tone of disagreement. You feel like you are arguing, but with no one.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
You feel like you are arguing
So now you're telling me how I feel?
Edit:
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@Obsolesce said in The Death of Sysadmin:
@scottalanmiller said in The Death of Sysadmin:
You feel like you are arguing
So now you're telling me how I feel?
Edit:
lol
