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And to me - I had that experience, and it was called Heroku. You know, it was the most DevOps thing that I had ever used in my entire life, was being able to say "git push heroku", not have to think about my operations at all, but know that it was like taken care of, that I had answers to every question about scale, an... |
But DevOps as a term has changed, as I think the Agile era of the aughts sort of undervalued and played down the importance of operations as a practice. I think a lot of the people who are the Linux sysadmin archetype of the late '90s might be seen as sort of getting their comeuppance now or their day in the sun of lot... |
And my experience, of "I just want to be able to "git push heroku" and have my app work in the cloud and not have to worry about it ever again" is, I think, still the pinnacle of what I would want as a developer. And of developers that I've talked to that have had that experience in real life, they all wish that we cou... |
\[28:10\] And Heroku still exists and it's still a thing, and I love the people there and I love the product, but clearly, it's not a flavor of answer that the market is searching for, because everyone thinks that they're going to need Google scale and Facebook scale kind of tools for the job that's in front of their v... |
So DevOps as an overall meme in the industry I think has been net negative, and slowed down a lot of teams by way of distracting them, where the fact that teams now have to hire a certain number of DevOps people, quote unquote, "to full time just keep the hamster wheel spinning of their cloud-based computing", whereas ... |
That's what I, in spite of the poll results - I think like 44% of the people saying sped up... I think some percentage of those people are just people who like really geek out about DevOps technologies and kind of don't care and are just team pro-DevOps... And some percentage are just people who like living in the ideo... |
So I'm coming across as pretty anti-DevOps here, but I think that when you look at the replies, the number one point of contention is that no one has a shared understanding of like what we mean by the word "DevOps". And so just to focus on automation here, it's - yes, I love real automation, but I don't think that what... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This specific question is something that I'm really passionate about, because I am in the DevOps camp, but for other reasons. So it's not about the technology. I mean, there are some aspects of that, just to see how things are changing and how they're improving... But I understand it at a very fundame... |
One thing, which I would like to say, the first thing, is that git push is the pinnacle, you're right. And that should not change. Changelock.com, the setup itself has always been git push. We use Ansible, we use Docker, we're on Kubernetes now... We'll be using something else not before long, I'm sure of it. It has al... |
I see a lot of parallels between test-driven development and testing, and DevOps and infrastructure, where you can see things right or wrong, and the outcome will be a result of your perception, of your principles, and eventually, your skill set as well. |
So what I can say is that if your users are happy, latency is low, all the requests are going through, nothing is lost, data isn't lost, you're doing something right. And as long as developers, which by the way, are also users - as long as you can just git push and show them what is happening at all levels, whether it'... |
\[32:12\] So you're right, Heroku had something for it, and there's many things that have happened afterwards. But to be honest, not everybody cares about these things, or should they. They shouldn't really care; they should just git push or just use the service and be happy. That's the end goal, to simplify it. |
So let's switch focus to something that I know you have a lot of experience in, which is testing. Just as a lot of advice out there about DevOps is bad, I know that a lot of the advice that's out there about testing is bad. Why is that? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. So in trying to connect the two themes, what you just shared about DevOps is 100% true and matches my experience as well. And where the analogy between the two struggles a little bit, is that if I want to have that git push Heroku experience and it cost me $30 a month, it is very difficult, I thi... |
So I think of the failures of DevOps as being a failure to recognize the time sink that a lot of teams find themselves dumping lots and lots and lots of hours into when there's commodity services that if you would only adhere to a set of conventions, would get the job done close to, or as well. |
Testing is kind of like same core fallacy, is that we talk a lot about the activity and the importance of it in a sort of boolean state, like "Are you DevOps? Are you not DevOps? Are you in the cloud? Are you not in the cloud? Are you tested? Are you not tested?" It's sort of like the degree of sophistication, because ... |
So simply, there's usually some, if not a person, like a mood in the team that's like "In order for us to be a moral and ethical and upstanding team, we should be able to check this box or that box." And so I want to check the box that I'm doing DevOps on and check the box that I'm testing. And when we consider the bad... |
And so what I think about the failings of either are when the team lacks an appreciation for the overall total cost of ownership, the overall return on investment of where their time is going, and what are they getting for that time, or you know, in terms of AWS, or if you're running a bunch of server somewhere to auto... |
\[36:00\] And unless you know, in a quite data-driven way, the answers to a lot of these questions, general context-free advice that you see about the right way to run a test or the right tool to use is not necessarily going to help put you closer to the end goal, which is like the tests serve the team to accomplish wh... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a great one. That's a great one. I will have to do something -- go back on the DevOps slot; I just can't leave it. Let's put it that way, I just can't leave it. |
So DevOps and automation - let's just talk automation - is something that once you get to a certain... I wouldn't even say like team size or certain complexity, a certain maturity - you have to do. And yes, you can delegate all of that to some service provider. But knowing how the service provider works and knowing how... |
So having that operational knowledge of how these things work, and how they integrate, and what happens between your git push, and the code actually ending in production. And what happens between patching all the stuff that needs to be out there. And maybe - you know what, maybe it's just like your code dependencies. B... |
So this is like operating your software; there's a lot of knowledge, even if you're using every single provider under the sun, and you delegate, you offload all those tasks, they still combine at some point. And whether you know it or not -- I don't know of a platform that does it all, because they can't; they're just ... |
So there's a lot of detail in how stuff runs and how stuff gets out there. And what happens when things fail? Because they do fail. How do systems degrade? So it's more of that operational knowledge that I think you have to have, that you need to automate around, so that things are easy, so that things are resilient, t... |
**Justin Searls:** There's a burden of knowledge and experience that I bring about testing, that you bring about infrastructure to each new thing that you do or team that you join. And one of the things that I think we, as an industry, especially as we have created more sophisticated tools on every front, whether those... |
What we fail to appreciate, I think, are the inflection points or really the step function, or what, in my brain, I envision as a literal cliff of what do you do when you're transitioning from small enough to be able to use a commodity service and not really care about, so that you can focus on the thing that you're bu... |
\[40:20\] And so I think about that in terms of slinging code and testing too, right? Like, if you're able to build a proof of concept, get something out the door, there's no tests at all... The same would go for applying rigorous architecture and design principles to the software. And then same would go for let's say ... |
We might have done all of those kinds of things early, shed that complexity, to get out the door as fast as possible. But in each of those cases, once we reach that breaking point -- like if I've got a server-side render application, I can't just like flick a switch and then remake it as a single page application, just... |
And appreciating that when we talk about scale, we are not talking about twisting a knob up or just getting more revenue... Like, we're talking about very specific inflection points where you have to start caring about those deeper levels of knowledge that you're speaking about. And that's where I think there's a lot o... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You asked me before we started recording what I hope to achieve with this podcast. That's one of the things. How do we share more of that? How do we bring those nuances out? How do we have those discussions and figure out how stuff is changing and how do we need to adapt to those changes? What makes s... |
**Break:** \[42:44\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Let's seek a very specific example about what I think is a test suite gone wrong. Imagine, Justin, that you have just joined a team of nine developers, so you're developer number ten, and they're all working on the same monolithic codebase. This team has constant test flakes, which means that the test... |
**Justin Searls:** Yes, well - I mean, unfortunately, it is all too common of a situation, and I think that it is challenging to write tests that are not susceptible to several specific things that contribute to what is commonly called brittleness or flakiness, right? The most important thing to understand as we're app... |
And I think the first thing that a team should consider when they are running into this problem is to get back to consistent green builds as fast as possible. Because again, if you're thinking about testing as ROI, if all nine of those people are getting an email every single time that the build breaks, and then say th... |
So the first thing that I would do is I would lockdown everything. Normally, I don't like freezing time in the system, right? But I'd probably start with the common quick fixes that I can apply, like "Hey everyone, it is now 2019, August 3rd, it's a Tuesday, and it's 11:33 PM, and we're just going to lock that whole se... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. What does the consistent build mean? So we said one in five passing; very bad, very inconsistent. What does a consistent build mean to you? |
**Justin Searls:** \[47:53\] For me, the ideal and the asymptotic goal that I would have is anytime that I saw a build fail, it means that something is broken in the application. And by the way, I think this is actually the popular notion that managers who are told about testing and see a build on the wall - like, thei... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Justin Searls:** But the business person is still thinking, "Wow, there's like a lot of failures, and so it's time well spent to go and fix those brokenness", because like in their mind, in the business person's mind, like anytime spent fixing the build is time spent making my system work when it didn't work. And so ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Justin Searls:** And we shouldn't be the same kind of upset, right? So the flakiness is one thing. I would only want my test to fail if something was actually broken. And I would go a step further and say, "I only want my build to fail if the production code doesn't work." So if a test was just somebody forgot to upd... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. What about -- so there's follow up which I think it complicates things and it makes them more real as well... What about a test suite that has to rely on integration tests, because the software that it tests is really complex, and you have to do black box testing... Because a lot of the stuff - ... |
The other aspect is not everyone can run it locally, because the stuff that the system has to provision, the setup is too big; it won't fit on a development machine. It needs multiple machines just to basically orchestrate the system as a whole. That may be an over reliance on integration tests, but this type of knowle... |
So there's that aspect, but the other one is around different CI systems flaking in different ways. So the same test runs in two separate CI systems, and not the same tests fail the same way in the two different CI systems. There's nothing wrong with the tests; there may be a timing issue, but more importantly, it's a ... |
**Justin Searls:** There's another aspect to what we were discussing earlier, about this sort of boolean mindset that the people have - is it tested, is it not? And one of the things that ideology has led to most teams, at least the majority of that I run into, to conclude is that there is a single bucket for every app... |
\[52:11\] And there is a default sort of assumption -- even on, I would say, highly competent teams, you might be able to expect that there are unit tests that will indeed run locally, of most things that are added, and there might be like one integration test that may be will run the whole application and just prove t... |
There's two things that make tests very, very expensive to run, that you hit on. One, on the first bit is this logical organization failure on our parts. So what I would say is - okay, let's say that you're building a system that interacts with an early client of ours, interacts with the paging network on electrical gr... |
And so what I would encourage people to do is have multiple test suites and work backwards. So like what's the most resource contented environment that you might have? Maybe it's spinning up 100 different servers and so forth, they are operating under a particular scale... Like, great, we're going to do the bare minimu... |
So that's, I think, at the end of the day, one of the answers to, I think, all these questions - you end up with trying to maximize the number of isolated units that can be tested in isolation, where you get really straightforward, not only fast feedback, but the feedback tells you exactly what line the failure was on ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** We have time for one last question, and it's going to be a quick one... |
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