worldofgeese

joined 1 year ago
 

I'm the author. With 5 years experience as a DevOps Engineer then Lead, I've wanted, for a very long time, to distill my critique and pave a way toward a healthier practice of DevOps. Before anyone jumps to tell me how DevOps Engineer is a misnomer, I address this in the article.

I wrote this piece because DevOps has all too often been misunderstood as a practice. Here I attempt to examine successful DevOps practice as a sociotechnical solution that weds culture and tools (the DevOps most are familiar with) with radical agency and visibility. I reference some stupendous thinkers in this space, like Jabe Bloom and Andrew Clay Shafer who were the first to argue for a sociotechnical approach to our work as IT professionals.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, "cruft" accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as "immutable". Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don't leave the system in an inconsistent state.

What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

Is that helpful at all? There's also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Because it uses OCI images, it auto-updates like a Chromebook, and you can switch between modes, like say a gaming mode that's a full SteamOS replacement, to a mode that gives you an entire development environment without needing to install and configure these layers or stacks of capabilities yourself.

That's very powerful. For cloud native developers like myself who are used to working with container images as the deliverable artifact, this makes that workflow very easy. Podman is included. You can create entire development environments at will that are totally "pure": no side effects because everything you need is in the container. That's a Dev Container.

 

OCI images that you can turn into a full-fledged developer workstation shipping Devbox, Nix, Homebrew, devcontainers and DevPod with one command. Pretty swanky!