Devopsdays 2009

Every day, in every country in the developed world, I.T. fails us. People fume over failed bank transactions, travel bookings, and supermarket transactions. Most of the I.T industry seem be focussed on apportioning blame instead of resolving the problems.

I blame Sun.

I think that the split between Unix Systems Administrators and Developers Who Write Stuff That Runs on Unix began in the second half of the 1990s when two things happened:

  • Java emerged as a viable cross-platform language.
  • Windows got a little better as a development environment.

Before you knew it, developers were learning to write Java code on PC's that ran Windows. Then they went and got jobs. It probably seemed easier to let the developers stick with using Windows to write code on, because you could Write Once and Run Anywhere.

They had no clue how to deploy the code that they'd written.
So they got other people in to help them, who didn't write code but knew their way around systems.

All this happened to a backdrop of the .COM boom: when we had no decent middleware available for free, and needed systems administrators to deploy prototypical web applications and their prototypical web frameworks onto all those Sun servers.

What are we left with? Millions of people who strongly identify as developers and only write software in an IDE. They are given no incentive to take responsibility for deploying, testing, or (in some cases) even maintaining the code that they write. There's another large number of people who do the things that the first group of people don't. Some people in the first group aren't aware that there's a problem. Most of the people in the second are. It's not any one groups' fault: we just need to recognize where we are and move on.

Devopsdays: you're not alone

Note: I have a backlog of posts from both DevOpsDays and ScaleCamp. This is just one of them.

DevOps New Zealand