We need a holistic approach to DevOps, one that treats tools, workers who use them and the wider organizations as contributing parts of an interdependent whole.

I’m the author. With 5 years experience as a DevOps Engineer then Lead, I’ve wanted, for a very long time, to distill my critique and pave a way toward a healthier practice of DevOps. Before anyone jumps to tell me how DevOps Engineer is a misnomer, I address this in the article.

I wrote this piece because DevOps has all too often been misunderstood as a practice. Here I attempt to examine successful DevOps practice as a sociotechnical solution that weds culture and tools (the DevOps most are familiar with) with radical agency and visibility. I reference some stupendous thinkers in this space, like Jabe Bloom and Andrew Clay Shafer who were the first to argue for a sociotechnical approach to our work as IT professionals.

  • lysdexicEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I agree that complexity is the problem and I’m avoiding Kubernetes like the plague. I set up a nomad cluster in a few days and it just works, has service discovery, and is perfectly simple to understand.

    I think Kubernetes gets a bad rap out of ignorance. You can make it as complex as you want, but you can also keep things trivial and simple if that’s what your aiming for.

    Case in point, I operate a Kubernetes cluster with microk8s. I got my nodes up and running in a one-time setup, and after this all I need to do is kubectl apply -k to get my apps deployed and running. Each konfiguration script is trivial too. ingress, services, deployments. That’s it. A docker compose script is far more complex and hard to maintain than that. Where’s the complexity?

    Honestly, have you ever gave kubernetes a try? If you did, what exactly did you tried to do? I bet that if you do an honest apples-to-apples comparison with any setup that you believe works, you’ll notice that you’re doing far more work to achieve the same result. This is a given as you’re pointing out nomad of all things as something simple.