> I half believe the reason developers are embracing cloud architecture so much is to remove so many sysadmins out of the equation.
It was literally true at one of my previous jobs. We couldn't install anything on our own dev machines without approval from Net Ops, not even Notepad++ (I don't think I ever got that installed, never got approval).
We once asked for a new server which mirrored the software of an existing server with two months lead time and got complaints that two months is not enough time to get a new server. I think we ended up getting it in three months, after the new project was supposed to be deployed to it.
Meanwhile we were starting to get into Azure, and we had a new server in Azure up and spinning with everything we needed installed on it in about 15 minutes.
The Lead Developer said, "We need to get as much stuff on the cloud as we can so we can stop dealing with this mess." We dealt with a lot of PHI there, though, so there was only so much we could do.
I've seen this as well. "Timeline from internal IT for provisioning a box and deploying our app is 6 months, and subsequent changes go through a ticketing system with a 2 week average turnaround. Or, we can have it running ourselves on AWS in 30 minutes."
Shit. So, you're saying that my mess of a team is kinda awesome by implementing reliable production-ready deployments within 2-4 weeks, and implementing changes to environments within like 30 minutes ("set key foo to bar in configs please?") to a week ("we need persistence!").
I guess IT in this place really is getting up to speed.
It was literally true at one of my previous jobs. We couldn't install anything on our own dev machines without approval from Net Ops, not even Notepad++ (I don't think I ever got that installed, never got approval).
We once asked for a new server which mirrored the software of an existing server with two months lead time and got complaints that two months is not enough time to get a new server. I think we ended up getting it in three months, after the new project was supposed to be deployed to it.
Meanwhile we were starting to get into Azure, and we had a new server in Azure up and spinning with everything we needed installed on it in about 15 minutes.
The Lead Developer said, "We need to get as much stuff on the cloud as we can so we can stop dealing with this mess." We dealt with a lot of PHI there, though, so there was only so much we could do.