Category Archives: DevOps.com

Why we can’t move past installers to talk about operations – the underlay gap

Posted on by
1

20 minutes.  That’s the amount of time most developers are willing to spend installing a tool or platform that could become the foundation for their software.  I’ve watched our industry obsess on the “out of box” experience which usually translates into a single CLI command to get started (and then fails to scale up).

Secure, scalable and robust production operations is complex.  In fact, most of these platforms are specifically designed to hide that fact from developers.  

That means that these platforms intentionally hide the very complexity that they themselves need to run effectively.  Adding that complexity, at best, undermines the utility of the platform and, at worst, causes distractions that keep us forever looping on “day 1” installation issues.

I believe that systems designed to manage ops process and underlay are different than the platforms designed to manage developer life-cycle.  This is different than the fidelity gap which is about portability. Accepting that allows us to focus on delivering secure, scalable and robust infrastructure for both users.

In a pair of DevOps.com posts, I lay out my arguments about the harm being caused by trying to blend these concepts in much more detail:

  1. It’s Time to Slay the Universal Installer Unicorn
  2. How the Lure of an ‘Easy Button’ Installer Traps Projects

5 Key Aspects of High Fidelity DevOps [repost from DevOps.com]

Posted on by
3

For all our cloud enthusiasm, I feel like ops automation is suffering as we increase choice and complexity.  Why is this happening?  It’s about loss of fidelity.

Nearly a year ago, I was inspired by a mention of “Fidelity Gaps” during a Cloud Foundry After Dark session.  With additional advice from DevOps leader Gene Kim, this narrative about the why and how of DevOps Fidelity emerged.

As much as we talk about how we should have shared goals spanning Dev and Ops, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. To fuel a DevOps culture, we have to build robust tooling, also.

That means investing up front in five key areas: abstraction, composability, automation, orchestration, and idempotency.

Together, these concepts allow sharing work at every level of the pipeline. Unfortunately, it’s tempting to optimize work at one level and miss the true system bottlenecks.

Creating production-like fidelity for developers is essential: We need it for scale, security and upgrades. It’s not just about sharing effort; it’s about empathy and collaboration.

But even with growing acceptance of DevOps as a cultural movement, I believe deployment disparities are a big unsolved problem. When developers have vastly different working environments from operators, it creates a “fidelity gap” that makes it difficult for the teams to collaborate.

Before we talk about the costs and solutions, let me first share a story from back when I was a bright-eyed OpenStack enthusiast…

Read the Full Article on DevOps.com including my section about Why OpenStack Devstack harms the project and five specific ways to improve DevOps fidelity.

Are VMs becoming El Caminos? Containers & Metal provide new choices for DevOps

Posted on by
9

I released “VMS ARE DEAD” this post two weeks ago on DevOps.com.  My point here is that Ops Automation (aka DevOps) is FINALLY growing beyond Cloud APIs and VMs.  This creates a much richer ecosystem of deployment targets instead of having to shoehorn every workload into the same platform.

In 2010, it looked as if visualization had won. We expected all servers to virtualize workloads and the primary question was which cloud infrastructure manager would dominate. Now in 2015, the picture is not as clear. I’m seeing a trend that threatens the “virtualize all things” battle cry.

IMG_20150301_170558985Really, it’s two intersecting trends: metal is getting cheaper and easier while container orchestration is advancing on rockets. If metal can truck around the heavy stable workloads while containers zip around like sports cars, that leaves VMs as a strange hybrid in the middle.

What’s the middle? It’s the El Camino, that notorious discontinued half car, half pick-up truck.

The explosion of interest in containerized workloads (I know, they’ve been around for a long time but Docker made them sexy somehow) has been creating secondary wave of container orchestration. Five years ago, I called that Platform as a Service (PaaS) but this new generation looks more like a CI/CD pipeline plus DevOps platform than our original PaaS concepts. These emerging pipelines obfuscate the operational environment differently than virtualized infrastructure (let’s call it IaaS). The platforms do not care about servers or application tiers, their semantic is about connecting services together. It’s a different deployment paradigm that’s more about SOA than resource reservation.

On the other side, we’ve been working hard to make physical ops more automated using the same DevOps tool chains. To complicate matters, the physics of silicon has meant that we’ve gone from scale up to scale out. Modern applications are so massive that they are going to exceed any single system so economics drives us to lots and lots of small, inexpensive servers. If you factor in the operational complexity and cost of hypervisors/clouds, an small actual dedicated server is a cost-effective substitute for a comparable virtual machine.

I’ll repeat that: a small dedicated server is a cost-effective substitute for a comparable virtual machine.

I am not speaking against virtualize servers or clouds. They have a critical role in data center operations; however, I hear from operators who are rethinking the idea that all servers will be virtualized and moving towards a more heterogeneous view of their data center. Once where they have a fleet of trucks, sports cars and El Caminos.

Of course, I’d be disingenuous if I neglected to point out that trucks are used to transport cars too. At some point, everything is metal.

Want more metal friendly reading?  See Packet CEO Zac Smith’s thinking on this topic.