#DBHangOps 09/03/15 -- Relax Ops and more!
Hello everybody!
Join in #DBHangOps this Thursday, September, 03, 2015 at 11:00am pacific (18:00 GMT), to participate in the discussion about:
- How do Ops people reduce ops work?
- How is Ops/DevOps viewed in the workplace?
- "Relax Ops" -- how do you decompress when not working?
You can check out the event page at https://plus.google.com/events/chahiq5eu03e65m9fae2bfh6g70 on Thursday to participate.
As always, you can still watch the #DBHangOps twitter search, the @DBHangOps twitter feed, or this blog post to get a link for the google hangout on Thursday!
See all of you on Thursday!
You can catch a livestream at:
How do Ops people reduce ops work?
- "Automation" obviously...but what do you focus on first?
- Config management (puppet/chef/etc)
- finding ways to empower developers and other people you work with
- Allow developers to make production changes and schema changes to move things along
- If you can't give access for production changes, provide a method for people to read production data for debugging so you don't need to run queries all the time
- Spinning up of new machines and databases
- Orchestrator! Helps make replication changes very easy to make
- Help provide easy insight into replication topologies for database clusters
- Documentation!
- Write down answers to common questions
- What's one of the first things you focus on documenting?
- Site books
- Any documents that make things better for DBA and other teams interacting with them
- Runbooks for remediating alerts
- If it isn't customer-facing, maybe it doesn't need to be immediately escalated!
How is Ops/DevOps viewed in your workplace
- A lot of work for co-ownership of uptime and performance
- Empower developers to make config management changes (e.g. chef/puppet)
- Spend a lot of time educating developers about maintainability, performance, and how to address manual operational tasks
- A lot of shops usually hire a DBA when they're database infrastructure starts to have problems
- this doesn't necessarily lend itself to the database infrastructure being treated the same as the rest of the infrastructure
- as much as possible, you should push to have your database environment as similar to other parts of the environments
- Make if so that youre aren't a SPOF!
- At Booking.com:
- Mostly all DevOps (though the application is a different team)
- There's a lot of collaboration between the production and application teams
- At Okta:
- Mostly a DevOps team
- Since DBA was initially a contracted role, there's been an evolution to DevOps over time
- A lot of the SysAdmins are DevOps engineers
- Figuring out where automation breaks down and how to make the databases more resilient to manual work
- Is there more about AWS or Chef to be learned to help automate further
RelaxOps
- how do you decompress? How do you manage your time with the rest of your team/organization?
- Set your hours and stick to them
- Turn off e-mail notifications when you're not in the office
- Work with your team to set boundaries for when you get escalated to
- Turn off work chat if you're not working! :)
- Different timezones can be challening (but helpful for on-call rotations sometimes!)
- Working remotely can be really challenging
- You miss out on in-office conversations and chats. This can be stressful.
- Get a remote presence setup!
- Get a fancy remote presence robot
- Setup a persistent Google Hangout
- Get a dedicated room to be your office so work can stay behind a closed door when you're done
- Manage your time!
- Silvia wrote a blog post about identifying burnout -- http://dbsmasher.com/2015/07/29/on-burnout/
- Do you find yourself heavily context switching?
- Are you working late in the evenings or overworking because of timezone differences?
- Are you taking enough vacation?
- Set an expectation around managing burnout with your team
- work to remove SPOFs in your organization so people can take breaks
- Set a cultural expectation to take breaks
- Unlimited time off can be a blessing and a curse
- Make sure you have expectations around taking your time off
- If you have unlimited PTO, it's easy to fall into a trap where you don't go on vacation
- Burnout
- It's okay to be a workaholic as long as your workplace doesn't expect it of you
- Not all work you do is burn out work. If there's a very engaging
- Make sure your work doesn't burn you out
- Acknowledge your own respsonbilities to help avoid it and make sure other folks can help
- Working
- Commiserating with others in your field
- Sometimes you just need to rant about a crappy thing at work to other people that understand. It's okay! (Just make sure to get back to being productive once it's out of your system)
- Presenting at conferences
- Share your experiences
- Find other people who are interested in your solution or experience
- Help make things better for everyone by sharing knowledge
- Side projects
- Having time to focus on side projects are a nice decompressor
- Regular Hackathons to work on fun projects on company time
- Being able to contribute to open source sometimes
- Finding overlap in side projects and work projects
- What do you do besides all this to decompress?
- Spend time with family going outside, watching movies, and more!
- Dancing!
- Music festivals and concerts!
- SLEEP!
- If you work at home -- anything that gets you out of the house or away from the work computer!
- Eating a lot of fried food!
- Go hiking with your dog!
- Go to meetups with other dogs!
- Make wine!
Links of supreme interest!