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How devops improved my dev
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Florian Gilcher
April 18, 2013
Programming
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1.5k
How devops improved my dev
Florian Gilcher
April 18, 2013
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Transcript
None
None
The hotel wireless was terrible, sorry for the lack of
pictures.
$ whoami
$ whoami $ cat .profile | grep export export GIT_AUTHOR="Florian
Gilcher" export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="florian.gilcher@asquera.de" export GITHUB_NICK="skade" export GITHUB_ORGANIZATIONS="asquera,padrino" export TWITTER_NICK="@argorak" export TM_COMPANY="Asquera GmbH"
@argorak
$ whoami Ruby Programmer since 2003 Now a consultant specialising
in backends... ... and team building. I run usergroups and organize conferences as a hobby.
http://asquera.de
http://padrinorb.com
http://eurucamp.org
“I don’t want to be woken up at night, so
I call myself a developer.”
I set out to present a more dev-minded perspective on
devops.
That was harder then I thought...
There’s a talk about the “transforming devs to devops” later
on.
git push developer mindsets/devops
Whats the benefit, if you don’t do a lot of
ops?
Vagrant Puppet Chef
Vagrant Puppet Chef
How did a devops mindset improve the software I write?
A bit of history about myself
I started my career in a typical agency job.
LAMP and the DEV/OPS split.
It wasn’t even that bad...
...until projects got special.
scale scope
Suddenly it turned out that one of the most efficient
teams was an admin, a programmer and a cup of coffee.
Example
An example One of our clients imports and reencodes videos
from a constantly changing number of sources each day.
Sources FTP upload FTP fetch RSS feeds RSS feeds that
are no RSS feeds And some more...
Destinations All of them need to be reencoded to a
standard set of sizes and bitrates.
Simple approach
Single program with architecture
Same architecture, 3 processes
Why?
Videos per day
Critical failures last year
Deployments last year
New ways of discussing things.
None
None
Practical things learned in the process.
... beyond writing daemons and stuff.
A different perspective on code.
Infrastructure as code.
Code for infrastructure.
Common CLI tools Common configurations styles Common way of doing
things
Gives insight Well managable Well automatable
In general, I care less about internal quality of programs
nowadays then about external quality.
My ugliest piece of code ran 1,5 years in production
without a change.
Nobody ever noticed how horrible it was.
I evaluate new software differently.
“Ease of setup” is a red flag.
This especially applies to new and fancy databases.
Not having to push any buttons to start working a
database is problematic, if not dangerous.
You might miss things along the way.
“Ease of non-trivial configuration” is far more important.
How to grade that?
Set up a production-like system.
Keep tally marks on how often it leaves you puzzled.
There is no such thing as “setting up production too
early.”
Everything before that is childs play.
The big bangs always happen in production.
My favourite: Expensive loadbalancers that die during configuration and need
to be shipped to the manufacturer.
Teams need to get used to their own systems.
Metrics and Logging are important in complex systems.
Most pure development teams underrate them and implement them too
late.
They should be there from day one.
Last but not least: internal tooling can save you a
lot of work.
Creative ways to talk about it even more.
None
But what about the humans?
Giving people say in many things makes them discuss many
things.
There are two things I rarely see in teams with
strict roles.
1. Platform refactorings
Why? It always means that individual roles loose ground.
Why? This can get political very quick.
Why? Lack of skill.
2. Code reviews
Why? Not enough staff that “is qualified” to review certain
code.
The devops mindset takes away a lot of friction.
Less asking permission, more doing.
When your frontend developer changes your backend API, your varnish
config, your deployment scripts and the puppet manifests before handing stuff off to review to implement a new feature, you are there.
Bonus points if said developer is the companies apprentice.
The devops mindset can be incredibly empowering.
Devops-minded teams can cope with missing team members easier.
Everyone knows what everything is roughly doing anyways.
Find hacks to gather and spread that knowledge across your
team!
None
To sum up:
Teams with a strong devops culture: can handle more complexity
Teams with a strong devops culture: can handle more complexity
can find more alternative approaches to problems.
Teams with a strong devops culture: can handle more complexity
can find more alternative approaches to problems. are more likely to find solutions that handle well in production.
Their immediate answers are more complex.
Thank you for listening.
How did devops change your development style?