On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 06:03:28PM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Who looks after your stack of software - such as in a typical LAMP 
> environment?

It depends.

If you've a jack-of-all-trades, or aren't big enough to hire separate
people, then your one person is it, they do the installs, the upgrades, the
DB"A", and they write the apps.  I've been there.

If you're a bit bigger, the chances are you've got someone who herds all of
your machines (desktops mostly, probably) and they'll probably install,
tweak, and patch the stack, and there'll be a web monkey who puts the
software together.  Either of one of them might do the DB stuff, depending
on who has the skills.

As you get bigger, you'll probably keep much the same structure.  At one
place I know, there's a team of two or three admins who keep all of the
machines together and do the underlying DB work (create DBs and users), and
then the dozen or so developers put the apps on top and maintain the DB
schemas.

At some point, you'll probably have enough databases to justify having
someone specialise (even if it isn't their entire job) in wrangling the DBs. 
This is especially true if you've got Enterprisey DBs like Oracle or DB2,
because they need a lot more care and feeding than PgSQL or MySQL.

If you're a government department, then you'll probably have totally
different contracting organisations handling the server maintenance and
application management, and to get an admin change done, the developers will
need to lodge a ticket in the other company's ticket tracking system and
wait a week for it to be actioned[1].  You think I'm joking, but I'm not --
buy me a beer and I'll tell you stories that'll make your hair fall out (or
grow back, if you're didymo).

So, to reiterate my original comment, "It Depends" -- on how many people
you've got, what their skills are, what you're actually trying to
accomplish, and whether you're a byzantine bureaucratic organisation who
exists primarily for the purpose of sending normal people insane.

> How are you all doing this?

With the power of packaging and Puppet.

- Matt

[1] This is apparently corp-speak for "ignored, then misinterpreted, then
misimplemented, then closed without reason".

-- 
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html

Reply via email to