Language Importance for DevOps Engineers

http://blog.hypergeometric.com/2012/02/05/language-importance-for-devops-engineers/

by gpapilion • 14 years ago

2 7 14 years ago

blog.hypergeometric.com

artemvv3• 14 years ago

The article is very biased opinion indeed. PHP, JavaScript, SQL, Java and Perl? Wow. Party like it's 1999. Honestly, I don't see DevOps doing JavaScript. I am no aware of any DevOps tools based on JavaScript and server-side JavaScript movement is only beginning. PHP, Perl, SQL, Java are a dead waste of time. Major DevOps tools such as Chef, Capistrano, Fog, Puppet, are based on Ruby. Systems are written in C and system control utilities are all Shell. A DevOps guy needs to know Ruby or Python (pick one), Shell and C. Erlang and JavaScript would probably be next on the list.

gpapilion2• 14 years ago

You don't need to know chef, its a simple DSL that is quite wasteful resource-wise.

I'd pick ruby over python, but thats just me. I'd still choose perl over either, but thats because things like threading and the low memory footprint are appealing.

DevOps is about running the stack. If you don't understand the stack your, you're not doing devops.

artemvv3• 14 years ago

You are confusing DevOps with full-stack engineering. These are two different things.

DevOps is about continuous deployment, continuous integration, automation, infrastructure as code. Your choses to do infrastructure as code are Chef (Ruby), Puppet (Ruby), CFEngine (C), and BCFG2 (Python). You will not get very far with DSL-only knowledge of Chef of Puppet only. The case is the same with CFEngine and BCFG2. All infrastructure as code frameworks assume you are going to customize.

As for the resources, the most valuable resource these days is engineering time. Chef specifically and Ruby toolchain overall are hyper-efficient when it comes to engineering time.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

Your mileage will vary. In my life working for "the man" as a sysadmin or developer type in Mountain View, it broke out like this:

Shell scripts: a little bit here and there. Mostly for my own shortcuts to save time doing repetitive stuff.

Perl, PHP, Ruby, Chef/Puppet, Haskell: Zero.

Javascript: Only if cargo-culting a "make this table sortable" thing into a web page counts.

Java: Just that one time, to help out some folks who were on vacation when their service broke.

SQL: Unfortunately, more than I like to admit. Almost always used in conjunction with...

Python: Far more than I liked. One service was nothing but Python code written with a typical scripter mentality. Pain.

C: Rarely, like a one-afternoon tool we used just once.

C++: Constantly. So many things were and are written in it.

I must say that lumping C and C++ together is worrisome. Odds are, you're not going to use them the same way.

Language Importance for DevOps Engineers

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