Regress to Developmestuction



  • I recently started at this fairly small place. They have the usual development, test, qa and prod environments, each with its own set of servers and what-not. After a few days, the dev manager tells me he wants to merge the common servers for dev and test into one cluster to save some money on hardware. Tolerable, but I had a sinking feeling as to where this was heading. Sure enough, a week later, he decides that we can move all of the back end servers (dev, test, qa and prod) into ONE cluster, and have all the clients from all four environments hit the cluster in a round-robin sort of way.

    Mind you, this person is not talking about running multiple instances of a back-end application on the same box; the goal is to have one instance of the back-end app running on each physical server with each and every one handling requests from all four environments, meaning each back-end app has to have access to 4 different DB's, etc!

    I try to explain that it's inappropriate to be mixing development and production requests on the same server, and that any changes in the data structures or DB would become a horror to debug, test and deploy. The reply? "Nonsense, we can just put special case code in as needed to point to the right instance of the database, use new/old data structures and different processing logic, etc."

    *shivers* 



  • did you tell him about VM ware?  just use one computer with 4 operating systems running at once.



  • First, ask him why you were hired.

    If it was purely for writing code, shut up, write code, and send out your resume as soon as possible.

    If it was something more senior, such as an analyst, ask him why he won't allow you to do your job.  This will let you know if he really just wants you to just do development.  Then send out your resume, but don't write any more code.

    Either way, you are heading down a hellhole that if you can not divert now will be the Charibdis in this company's story.  Best to head out now if they don't want your help.



  • Y'know, no matter how many times I look up the definition of "developmestuction", my brain keeps rejecting it. It's a horrible, ugly, gangly abomination of a neologism with no intuitively apparent meaning.

    "Develop me some stucco suction", perhaps?
     



  • Merging the servers into a cluster is a good idea, as long as you use the VMWare solution mentioned above, and you are careful to make sure the production system always has enough resources when you do stress testing in developement and qa systems.



  • @Zylon said:

    Y'know, no matter how many times I look up the definition of "developmestuction", my brain keeps rejecting it. It's a horrible, ugly, gangly abomination of a neologism with no intuitively apparent meaning.

    "Develop me some stucco suction", perhaps?
     

    Its Alex's "cute" term for an environment that is both for "development" and "production" at the same time (developme-s-tuction, gittit?). I agree that its lame.

    -dZ.


  • Ahh yes, a prodelopment environment.



  • I just read it with the missing 'n' restored, developmenstruction. Or, development-destruction, as in destruction of production by overwriting it with development.

     


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