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0 pointsmarcus0x622y ago0 comments

I've never seen an IT team that couldn't spin up a VM in minutes. I have seen a bunch of teams that weren't allowed to because of ludicrous "change control" practices. Fire the managers that create this state of affairs, not the devops folks, regardless of whether you "go cloud" or not.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

sofixa2y ago· 2 in thread

I've met multiple customers where time to get a VM was in the weeks to months. (To be fair, I'm at a vendor that proposed IaC tooling and general workflows and practices to move away from old school ClickOps ticket-based provisioning, so of course we'd get those types of orgs).

And more often than not, it had nothing to do with managers, but with individual contributors resisting change because they were set in their ways and were potentially afraid for their jobs. Same applies for firewall changes btw.

steveBK1232y ago

I think a lot of HN crowd hangs out at FAANG/FAANG adjacent or at least young/lean shops, and has no idea how insane it is out there.

I was at a shop that provisions AWS resources via written email requests & clickops, treated fairly similar to a datacenter procurement. Teams don't have access to the AWS console, cannot spin up/down, stop, delete, etc resources.

A year later I found out that all the stuff they provisioned wasn't set up as reserved instances. We weren't even asked. So we paid hourly rates for stuff running 24/7/365.

This was apparently the norm in the org. You have to know reserved instances exist, and ask for them.. you may eventually be granted the discount later. I only realized what they had done when they quoted me rates and I was cross checking ec2instances.info I can guarantee you less than 20% of my org (its not a tech shop) is aware this difference exists, let alone that ec2instances.info exists for cross reference.

No big deal, just paying 2x for no reason on already overpriced resources!

shermantanktop2y ago

I went from that type of world (cell carrier) to a FAANG type company and it was shocking. The baseline trust that engineers were given by default was refreshing and actually a bit scary.

I’m not sure my former coworkers would have done well in an environment with so few constraints. Many of them had grown accustomed to (and been rewarded and praised for) only taking actions that would survive bureaucratic process, or fly underneath it.

steveBK1232y ago· 1 in thread

Teams are what they DO, not what they CAN DO.

marcus0x62OP2y ago

Ok, but I’m not sure what that has to do with what I posted.

ownagefool2y ago

The problem is the strong players are less likely to stick around, so you often do end up with folks who can't do the work in minutes - though, the work is usually slightly more than clicking the "give me the vm" button.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse