Latest from Rob
Are LLMs Leading DevOps Into a Tech Debt Trap?
Some of the most alluring uses of LLMs could lead to terrible outcomes for enterprises and their DevOps and platform engineering teams.
Jul 12, 2023 · 3 minAll articles by Rob Hirschfeld
Showing 1–10Infrastructure as Code and Six Key Automation Concepts
This summer, I walked into an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) flame war because I was blissfully unaware of just how broadly IaC had been reinterpreted. Reviewing the comments, it’s clear that thinking has evolved since Kief Morris’ 2016 Infrastructure as Code tomb. So, after strapping on my asbestos suit, I decided to dig into what […]
SRE vs. DevOps vs. Cloud Native: The Server Cage Match
This post supports my DevOpsDays Austin Presentation on May 4 I don’t believe in DevOps shaming. Our community seems compelled to correct use of DevOps as an adjective for tools, teams and teapots. The frustration is reasonable: DevOps clearly taps into head space for both devs and operators who see a brighter automated future together. […]
How the Lure of an ‘Easy Button’ Installer Traps Projects
As preamble for this post, I wrote about the Unicorn Installer challenge. The challenge is that user needs are too deeply heterogeneous for good reasons to create a vertically integrated way (aka an “easy button”) that works for all users. The problem is not just current diversity, it’s also about how we cope with needed […]
It’s Time to Slay the Universal Installer Unicorn
While many people want a universal “easy button installer,” they also want it to work on their unique snowflake of infrastructures, tools, networks and operating systems. I call them snowflakes because their small differences expand combinatorially. That divergence turns the idea of a prescriptive reference architecture into a destructive myth that limits community and ecosystem […]
5 Key Aspects of High Fidelity DevOps
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 […]
What If We Had Git for DevOps?
I used to hate Git. Compared to my previous source control systems (SVN, SourceForge and floppies), it was cryptic, opaque and hard to learn. It was comfortable to create a set of files and folder, then snapshot them as a unit. It was simple to understand and improved my individual productivity. But that snapshot created […]
DevOps and the Challenge with Services
At RackN, we’ve been working for years to make DevOps portable across platforms. For us, that means the ability to move between clouds and from cloud to metal. Of the several challenges to portability—composability, API heterogeneity, sequence, cross-system dependencies—making configuration management tools work with services has been particularly important, as significant parts of building systems […]
Two paths to metal devops: cloud-like API driven & cluster building
I’ve been seeing a rising interest in metal DevOps fueled by containers and scale-out data center platforms (like Hadoop, Ceph & OpenStack) that run at the metal level. While I see this is a growing general trend (Packet, Internap, RackSpace, OpenStack Ironic, MaaS), I’m going to stay firmly within my wheelhouse and use OpenCrowbar as my reference here. […]
Are VMs becoming El Caminos?
In 2010, it looked as if virtualization 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. Really, it’s two intersecting trends: metal is […]