Hey everyone! I'm really curious about the state of software development before Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) became the norm. I know that developers and operations teams used to work separately, and I'm wondering how that impacted the development and deployment processes. Did developers have to rely heavily on ops teams for deployments? And with the rise of DevOps, is it true that developers can now deploy their applications on their own, while ops teams can focus more on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences!
5 Answers
The setup has changed so much. I remember handing off thumb drives for deployments and jumping through all these manual hoops just to get code into production. Now, it's just a click, and everything flows through automated tests and deployments. It's quite a relief!
Deployments could take forever back in the day! Installing apps in different environments could take half a day, meaning one person often had to do it all manually for the team. Nowadays, we set up everything through pipelines, and it can happen in minutes. CI/CD has made a huge difference, helping to catch human errors before they become problems.
Back then, it was all about the rivalry between devs and ops. We had to email ops just to get something deployed to production. Now, with a good pipeline, deployments are so much smoother and quicker, and there's less finger-pointing between teams. But honestly, I still see challenges with DevOps aligning all teams with the right goals.
Right? It's like, despite all the new tools, some teams still cling to their old habits.
That’s true! Sometimes it feels like the roles are still siloed in some places, even with all the new terms like SRE and DevOps floating around.
Though CI/CD was not really defined back then, we were still making it happen with shell scripts and a lot of manual coordination. I had to rely on a designated 'build person' who would run everything on a single machine. Let’s just say, if that machine crashed, we were in big trouble!
Ah, before CI/CD, things were pretty chaotic! We used to compile everything on one specific workstation that had the right setup and then manually push to production via FTP. I can't forget the long deployments where we'd pray everything worked out because messing it up meant some serious late nights. We often relied on scripts and had to hope everything went smoothly.
I remember those times too! I once altered a deploy script to use symlinks, which became a game-changer for rollbacks. My manager was so impressed, they brought it up at company meetings! The stress of those deployments was real.
Using rsync was a lifesaver too; I still have nightmares about those manual deployments. It’s kind of wild looking back on it.
Oh wow, thumb drives! I remember those days. It's amazing how automation has improved things, but I still prefer some good old command-line magic.