Sadly enough I agree with this rather bleak assessment to a large degree. I don't believe that we're truly stuck with it though. Why have Agile and DevOps movements gained so much traction (hype)? For me it almost always comes down to the need for better collaboration between silos. Architects shouldn't be constrained unnecessarily by the mindset of devs or ops but if they are making design decisions that can never be implemented then time is being wasted. Wasted design time. Wasted processing time for the people handed it. And wasted time coming up with workarounds. Efforts to eradicate this waste, even in small amounts, are worthwhile and should be undertaken.
We're massive fans of Blueprint. Richard et al did an amazing job with it. Anything that lowers the friction for use of Chef and Puppet is a great thing. We're looking forward to working more closely with the Blueprint guys with what we're doing as they are definitely fellow travellers in the fight to make the best tools easier to use :)
Hey, nice to see someone cares enough to post and comment on my blog.
BryantD, if you work in a place where testers review Puppet manifests that's awesome. It's fair to say I was generalising. I believe that the tools should be doing more to encourage it.
In my talk at the last GDC Online, I called for technical operations groups to engage QA in testing their tools: puppet manifests, cobbler installations, whatever. If I thought everyone was doing it I would have left that slide out.
I am not currently in a position which has me evaluating tools, but you are now on my list of tools to look at. I will admit it'd be nice to be able to give testers friendlier interfaces.
"I believe that the tools should be doing more to encourage it."
Can you provide an example of what that means? E.G. What should Jenkins be doing differently to encourage sysadmins to use it? What should Puppet be doing differently to encourage developers to use it?
What we want to see in "DevOps" tools is collaboration and visibility baked in. A tester in an Enterprise is unlikely to start writing Puppet manifests. If they could contribute notes and requirements to one though, perhaps even in a format that could be converted into a manifests then that would be a very powerful thing.
