Saturday, November 22, 2014

Are your developers heading on a path of no return?

OK, I still get mad when someone users the word DevOps for processes, where actually nothing about the Ops part is going on and none of the developers care or want to understand, that things like networking, CPU contexts switches and drivers exist. Then they are suddenly angry, that the software they developed on their laptops, sharing the same Layer 2 domain isn't working anymore when they put it on two separate cloud zones.
But this post isn't about that. It's about our increased reliance on external tools, workflows and providers. While being more agile we seem to sacrifice a lot of our knowledge, without even thinking about the business risks.

EaaP - Ecosystem as a Problem

We rely increasingly on things, which make the developers life easier, like one click installs, repository providers, various clouds. Every one of them has its risks.

If your cloud provider shuts down, your business dies

Have you ever thought about what will happen when your cloud provider decides to shut down? They wouldn't do that, or would they? For an example go read the AWS Agreement, section 11. For your convenience a quote (as of 2014-11-22)
WE AND OUR AFFILIATES OR LICENSORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES (INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, GOODWILL, USE, OR DATA), EVEN IF A PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. FURTHER, NEITHER WE NOR ANY OF OUR AFFILIATES OR LICENSORS WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY COMPENSATION, REIMBURSEMENT, OR DAMAGES ARISING IN CONNECTION WITH: (A) YOUR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICES, INCLUDING AS A RESULT OF ANY [...] (II) OUR DISCONTINUATION OF ANY OR ALL OF THE SERVICE OFFERINGS
Of course this will never happen, just keep believing it...

If the team building your deployment workflow decides to quit

All at once.
Yes, you have made your developers life easier, they just commit code to the repository, click one button and then magic happens. Congratulations, you have just replaced your former operations team with the ecosystem team. You can proudly use the term DevOps. The end result is mostly the same, if they quit at once or your upper management decides that they are doing nothing, because everything works and no shiny features are shown, and as such are just a money sink, you have at least a month to replace them and get them up to speed. 90% of your developers won't have any idea what's going on behind the scenes. I once had a situation where a developer asked what's a mountpoint, and it wasn't a junior dev... So good luck.

Your external monitoring tools shut down

There's also a pretty good chance the latest and greatest monitoring company out there with the shiny tools will go out of business. Or be bought out by a bigger corporation and subsequently shut down in a year. Maybe you will get a months notice, 6 months if you were really lucky. So you have to find a new company, adapt the tools, checks etc - it takes a lot of time. If you were using on site monitoring tools, even if the product won't be made anymore you can usually still keep it running until you will find a replacement, no deadlines here (short of having time based licenses - these are bad for you, although I have to admit they are way cheaper).

Your external repository provider dies

This may seem as not that big of an issue, modern tools keep the full repository history on every developers machine. So what's the catch? Your deployment tools rely on automated integration between that repository, test runners, clouds etc. It may not be easy to replace them in a timely fashion, to deploy critical patches, vulnerability fixes and others to your environment. The problem is similar like in the deployment workflow, no one in your company really knows what's going on under the hood of these systems, to reimplement a similar flow. But if you're lucky you can survive that with some loss...

Monday, March 26, 2012

Just a sad story

Facebook withdrawal day one: I'm still alive, but the day is long (until 6 AM on Tuesday!) and the urge to access it is hard. I've been writing there too much weird stuff, which no one should see. This thing here isn't visited at all so it's safe for now ;)

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Going to FOSDEM

So, I'm going to FOSDEM this year again and hopefully some of you will be there also. You can grab me either on the Friday Beer Event or Saturday Evening at La Bécasse. Of course I'll be hanging out at some of the talks, but hell, it's too many, I'll have to invent bilocation or even trilocation until Saturday, because I'm so undecided as what to take ;)

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Saturday, April 16, 2011

It's that time of the year again!

Another year, another Libre Graphics Meeting is coming! This time it's back in École Polytechnique in Montréal, Québec, Canada. It also means that I won't be able to come (Again! I miss you all, you know…), but if you're near or have some spare time please pay them a visit, I promise you'll never regret it.

In case that you, like me, can't come there's still a way in which you can be a part of it — just head over to Pledgie.com and donate a few Euro's, because every cent helps making a great conference happen!

See, I already envy those of you who will be there!

Click here to lend your support to: Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 Montreal and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Wartość

Ile są warte słowa
Których nike nie chce słuchać
Pełne pustych fraz
O tym że tęsniksz kochasz tulicz?
Ile są warte dni
W których pędzisz przed siebie
Nie bacząc na nikogo
Nie dążąc do żadnego celu?
Ile jesteś wart Ty
Gdy jedynie Tu
Wiesz o swoim istnieniu?
2011-01-14 22:35

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Vacation

I'll be unavailable until 23.08.2010. Going to grab some vacation time with my family. And yes, I know I'm terribly behind with mu Emerillon schedule :(

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Long road…

As you may have noticed, Emerillon 0.1.2 was recently released into the wild. The next release will come mid July as soon as some internal GNOME things are worked out — mainly the gsettings stuff, which right now seem to be a moving target. I hope to get something done by the weekend.

Right now I managed to get Ania to work on libgeouri so expect a release soon.

Interesting times ;)