The Recognition of DevOps Burnout and Solutions
What is Platform Engineering?
Hey Guys,
As remote work changes our new normal permanently there’s more DevOps burnout happening in 2021 and 2022. There’s also a mental health toll on remote work and working from home where life-work balance, isolation and constant communications can become an issue.
The rest of the workforce are finally catching up with software development and engineering folk. Nearly half of office workers are now working either fully remote or in some kind of hybrid work arrangement even as we approach, 2023, this is it folks this is the new normal.
Are we in the middle of the Great DevOps Burnout?
DevOps needs a mindset shift to save the overworked engineering collective.
Some believe the transition to platform engineering will help.
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.
Widespread signs of DevOps Burnout
A recent Haystack report suggests that we are in the middle of one. Eighty-three percent of the 258 software engineers surveyed reported feelings of burnout from high workloads, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets. Only 26% of participants reported working solely on product development, whereas 74% reported working on operations tasks in some capacity.
“Platform engineering emerged in response to the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-expert end users are often asked to operate an assembly of complicated arcane services,” says Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner.
Could platform engineering lift some of the drag on the tasks of engineers including software developers?
There is a growing conversation in the DevOps community about whether developers can or want to take on operations tasks.
To help end users, and reduce friction for the valuable work they do, forward-thinking companies have begun to build operating platforms that sit between the end user and the backing services on which they rely.
There’s actually a lot of debate in the community about this, and if how we do DevOps today is still working well.
Operations in DevOps - The Big Debate of 2022
InfoWorld’s Scott Carey boldly proclaimed that “devs don’t want to do Ops.” This Reddit thread, started in response to Carey’s article, further illustrates how polarized developers are when it comes to this question.
So what is SRE? Site reliability engineering is a set of principles and practices that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems.
This is also a management and leadership issue and a consensus problem for software engineers. Think about it, “when developers in teams don’t agree on the extent to which they should, or can, do operations tasks, forcing everyone to do DevOps in a one-size-fits-all way has disastrous consequences.”
The argument is this approach leads to DevOps burnout at much higher rates. Some view Platform Engineering as a functional but also a cultural shift to address this problem and organizational drag.
Historical Tidbit
According to Thenewstack, before 2006, most organizations followed a “throw it over the wall to operations” model of software delivery. Then Amazon CTO Werner Vogels changed everything when he announced that the company had implemented a “you build it, you run it” approach. Developers were then responsible for deploying and running their applications and services end to end. This quickly became the standard most engineering organizations built toward achieving.
On Reddit they were referring to “the Book” as Google’s guide to SRE, that managers are recommended to read.
The impact of Covid-19 on DevOps has been burnout, we might attribute this to various issues. A total of 83% of Software Engineers reported feelings of burnout with only 17% reporting no burnout. 55%, a majority, reported “great” or “moderate” levels of burnout. So what can be done?
Here we are also talking about the intersection between mental health, culture and DevOps. However, some people can become disillusioned when the change to DevOps doesn't happen overnight, and that disillusionment leads to burnout. Some Platform Engineering can make things easier.
This debate between DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering is about to get interesting in 2023.
There is a excellent series of books by Google explaining the idea of the Site Reliability Engineering, but how Platform Engineering is a “next stage” of DevOps isn’t really fully accepted yet.
Google's SRE book focuses on monitoring and alerting, defining SLOs of your services and tracking error budgets, incident response and postmortems. Clearly DevOps isn’t just building code products.
Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application. As Platform Engineering evolves, it can lower task overload in DevOps and thereby reduce the stress, disillusionment and burnout of software engineers and managers.
Historically and obviously, the growing complexity of technologies and architectures paired with the expectation for developers to be responsible for it all proved to be a crippling combination for many organizations. 2023 could be the year of Platform Engineering solving more directly DevOps burnout.
If you are an advocate, the idea is simple. Platform Engineering internalizes best practices and monitoring better. Platform Engineering thus provides a “golden paths, with recommended tools and best security practices” built in, reducing cognitive load while preserving developer freedom.
The history of the last ten years is actually pretty interesting if you think about it.
No wonder we came to a point of DevOps burnout.
More complex microservice architectures and technologies like Kubernetes, GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) became the industry standard. At the same time, developers became responsible for more of their applications’ life cycle and delivery workflows. Even simple tasks required end-to-end understanding of increasingly complex toolchains.
Of course all of this led to some pretty exaggerated statements trying to make a point:
Hints from Reddit and Twitter are somewhat interesting.
Luca Galante, a leading contributor to the Platform Engineering community and product lead at Humanitec, ran an informal Twitter poll on the topic.
Things become overly complex on the Ops side quickly:
Platform Engineering is really the obviously solution to all of this. But it also needs time to evolve for more organizations to adopt it more fully.
The IDP Layer Helps Manage Complexity and Help Devs Manage Ops
The gist of it is IDP. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application. An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a layer on top of the tech and tooling an engineering team has in place already. It helps operations structure their setup and enable developer self-service.
So all of this is just introductory, we’ve barely touched upon the nuts and bolts of how Platform Engineering can reduce cognitive load and reduce DevOps burnout. For now I’ll leave that to more talented writers with a better background in engineering and the Modern Data Stack.
There are all of these new solutions to make DevOps less of a drag. Self-service capabilities are essentially moving quickly and efficiently reducing the knots of productivity and mental health issues around the increasing complexity. With the increasing complexity of the modern cloud native world, freedom without appropriate boundaries creates too much pressure and becomes counterproductive.
I would say Platform Engineering has a bright future, since we’re approaching a SaaS-adoption standard. The vast majority (73%) of all U.S. businesses are planning to switch to SaaS in the near future; the demand to hire great engineers and find balance will continue to escalate for years.
All of this debate around DevOps burnout and the increasing importance of SRE and tools of Platform Engineering in the IDE layer is really facilitating a new reality for the future of software development, DevOps and even MLOps. How we operate in Cloud native environments continues to evolve even as software development languages continue to evolve.
To cover all of this is basically why I started writing Data Science Learning Center as a Newsletter. And, I’m just getting started. Anyways guys I hope you enjoyed the content, if you want to support the channel it would mean a lot to me.