back to article Virtualization twisted devs, cloud and SaaS made them monsters

At the VMware user group conference in Melbourne a couple of weeks back, NetApp's Josh Atwell wondered what it will take to repair relations between developers and ops teams. His history of the two tribes has them in a long, distrustful truce until virtualization took off, at which point developers revelled in pool of …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    "at which point developers revelled in pool of virtualized resources that were so much more available and flexible than had previously been the case."

    Thats one opinion, another was developers just got lazy and lost the skill of optimisation. Building a 200KB applications with 100MB of dependencies. I was a developer at the time, and I was seeing a generation of developers who couldn't even write a simple SQL statement, let a lone optimise one - they resorted to bulky frameworks like Doctrine and Hibernate (They've got their uses, but not here) and then blamed the framework when it ran slowly or needed 2GB ram to do a simple query!

    suffice to say I turned to the darkside of BoFH-hood.. It pays better, its less stress and I'm get lots of cash to spend of "toys" of my choosing!

  2. K

    "The internet of things (IoT) might also offer ops teams another way to win back respect from developers and line of business folks."

    I don't need their respect, all I need is their compliance!

  3. Federal

    SaaS Savings are partly from reduced features

    The software development process generally follows the "the last 10% of the work takes 50% of the development time" rule. That's where the unique requirements involving customizations and complex data integrations take place. They're hard for developers but greatly simplify work processes for end users.

    After the switch to SaaS end users are told "our workflow optimization (to get the overall function to fit into the cloud app) don't allow for that feature in this release."

    So the burden of extra work, which was eliminated as a cost of a couple months effort for developers and testers falls onto end users. 2 man months of effort saved at the cost of 5 minutes per week for each of 5,000 people.

    If it were only one function set in one app it wouldn't matter, but (at least in our case) the migration of multiple functions to cloud SaaS adds about 2 hours per week to each staff member's workload. Times 5,000 for at least a couple years.

    Management claims they've cut IT costs through "Workflow Optimization" and moving to the "the cloud", but staff wind up with less time to work productively and being aggravated by being forced to perform tedious workarounds.

    But that's considered progress in a buzzword world.

  4. barmijo

    The relationship between Dev and Ops has always been complicated

    Imho the source of the friction you describe is the different nature of Dev and Ops primary roles. Ops is paid to keep stuff running, while Dev is paid to bring new stuff out. Hence, from the perspective of Dev, much of what Ops has classically done actually looks like barriers. Since virtualization and cloud (now 17 and 10 years old respectively) commoditized some repetitive Ops functions, some Dev folks assumed Ops was dead. It wasn't.

    The current trend toward DevOps is forcing both groups to come to grips with cojoined roles. Progress, of course, takes time though. You can read a lot of posts online about Dev teams not taking their new Ops responsibilities seriously. If they start to scale, however, they will. Meanwhile Ops folks need to embrace the concept of Ops as Dev and learn how to put operational needs into user stories, get them on the backlog, and work with Dev to get them built. To keep their features in the mix during backlog grooming they'll also need to learn how to make them forward looking, enhancing the ability to role out features safely for instance rather than simply "we need to monitor x."

    IoT may stress DevOps growth simply because of scale but (again just my opinion) isn't an inflection point.

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