Comment by f1shy

Comment by f1shy 2 days ago

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>> Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!)

Is this really like that? Isn't there any Unix/DBA anymore? I associate DevOps to what at my time we called "operations" and "development". We had 5 teams or so:

1) Developers, who would architect and write code, 2) Operations who would deploy, monitor and address customer complaints, 3) Unix (aka SYS) administrators, who would take care of housekeeping of well, the OS (and web servers/middleware), 4) DBA who would be monitoring and optimizing Oracle/Postgres, and 5) Network admins, who would take care of Load Balancers, Routers, Switches, Firewalls (well, there were 2 security experts for that also)

So I think DevOps would be a mix of 1&2, to avoid the daily wars that would constantly happen "THEY did it wrong!"

Can somebody clear my mind, please!? It seems I was out of it for too long?!

Wilya 2 days ago

In full-cloud environments, in small/middle companies I've worked at:

Developers handle 1). Devops handle 2)/3)/5). Nobody does 4)

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  • f1shy 2 days ago

    Thanks. That is an interesting insight into the current reality. I assume the developers take care of optimization of queries; set up indexes and development of schemas and DB backups is handled by devops.

    I must say, again I thought (I read it somewhere?) DevOps should take care of the constant battle between Devs and Operations (I've seen enough of that in my times) by merging 1 and 2 together. But it seems just a name change, and if anything, seems worst, as a (IMHO) critical and central component, like the DB, now has totally distributed responsibilities. I would like to know what happens when e.g. a DB crashes because a filesystem is full, "because one developer made another index, because one from devops had a complaint because X was too slow".

    Either the people are extremely more professional that in my times, or it must be a shitshow to look while eating pop-corn.

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    • friendzis 2 days ago

      > DevOps should take care of the constant battle between Devs and Operations

      In practice there is no way to relay "query fubar, fix" back, because we are much agile, very scrum: feature is done when the ticket is closed, new tickets are handled by product owners. Reality is antithesis of that double Ouroboros.

      In practice developers write code, devops deploy "teh clouds" (writing yamls is the deving part) and we throw moar servers at some cloud db when performance becomes sub-par.

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  • sgarland 2 days ago

    Nobody does 4 until they’ve had multiple large incidents involving DBs, or the spend gets hilariously out of control.

    Then they hire DBREs because they think DBA sounds antiquated, who then enter a hellscape of knowing exactly what the root issues are (poorly-designed schemata, unperformant queries, and applications without proper backoff and graceful degradation), and being utterly unable to convince management of this (“what if we switched to $SOME_DBAAS? That would fix it, right?”).

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rtp4me 2 days ago

For 4) - consider PGHero[1] and PGTuner[2] instead of a full-time DBA. We use both in production and they work very well to help track down performance issues with Postgres.

[1] https://github.com/ankane/pghero

[2] https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/

Edit: For the record, I have worked at a few small companies as the "SysAdmin" guy who did the whole compliment of servers, OS, storage, networking, VMs, DB, perf tuning, etc.

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