On 28/10/2025 18:37, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
On 27/10/2025 14:41, Manar Hussain wrote:
So what's the next barrier? My take: deployment -- the effort to
choose/ assess, get buy-in/communication, configure, deploy, maintain
and extend etc.
Yes!
I was recently feeling frustrated about the complexity of "CI" setups
I've encountered at different clients. All of them have some kind of
gitlab or github pipeline set up to perform linting of the code and
tests, and ways to run those same lints and tests in your working copy
before committing, and usually some infrastructure in a cloud provider
of choice to provide a test environment where things can be deployed
to from CI or locally to run the tests against them. And often a
docker image that's set up to run the non-cloud-hosted parts of the
tests from, such as the linters and "terraform apply" and to run tests
that submit sample inputs to the stuff terraform has set up and check
the results are correct.
It's quite a lot of stuff. Sometimes thousands of lines of scripts and
configuration files. Yet every project has to build it themselves,
more or less from scratch. And then I come and join the project and
need to learn the particular spellings of everything each project
uses, and all its particular quirks and complications, and where the
scripts are all kept, and and and... It just seems a lot of
duplication of effort to create very similar results each time!
I spoke with a founder of a really interesting UK company that supplies
devops engineers for various uk gov departnes, as well as training AND
trains devops engineers from scratch -- all knitted together to help
departments get their in house team scaled up and working in a coherent
way (i.e. with broadly the same norms/approach), with the gap bridged
during the transition bridged by per day contractors they make good
money on. I.e. they are already "selling" some level of standardisations
because that's really useful even though there are many variants on what
would make an OK standard.
And yet even this company was intrigued but unwilling to invest in
deployment as a product because they get paid per diem for all the
effort it takes to reinvent the wheel so why should they.
It'll come, especially with AI maturing, but I've been waiting a long
time for it.
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