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The guy that sets up your laptop is an IT tech, not an SA. The SA is the hardcore linux admin who can code. From my perspective, and SRE is a SE that focuses en

The guy that sets up your laptop is an IT tech, not an SA. The SA is the hardcore linux admin who can code. From my perspective, and SRE is a SE that focuses entirely on back end performance and reliability, in order to support the SAs. DevOps is a term used by management to justify cost-savings by avoiding hiring someone to ensure system reliability, consistency, safety, and integrity.

hibikir 10y ago
Maybe in places that started well: I have no doubt that there have always been people out there that were doing system administration and could code. The places where I have seen DevOps become popular are those that completely separated programming keeping servers running, and where the people keeping said servers running were incapable of doing even mild automation. Places where rebooting a non-db server requires making a request 3 weeks in advance, and being OK with 4 hours of downtime. In those environments, those people that are called system administrators are very low productivity, can't help you with a performance problem if their life depends on them, and are easily replaceable with shell scripts. It's in those environments where DevOps and enterprise cloud migrations are popular: The developers might not be experts in scalability or in getting great uptime, but at least they can get something done. Ultimately this gives management an excuse to lay off all the sysadmins that don't know what /proc is, and make technical decisions based on Gartner reports. Again, that doesn't mean that everyone that has the title of sysadmin in the world can't code or is unproductive: This is not a judgement on the value of a good SA. I am just trying to open a window to a world that many developers get to see, but few good SAs notice, because there's no way in hell a good SA would work in said companies for long.

hibikir 10y ago

Maybe in places that started well: I have no doubt that there have always been people out there that were doing system administration and could code. The places where I have seen DevOps become popular are those that completely separated programming keeping servers running, and where the people keeping said servers running were incapable of doing even mild automation. Places where rebooting a non-db server requires making a request 3 weeks in advance, and being OK with 4 hours of downtime. In those environments, those people that are called system administrators are very low productivity, can't help you with a performance problem if their life depends on them, and are easily replaceable with shell scripts. It's in those environments where DevOps and enterprise cloud migrations are popular: The developers might not be experts in scalability or in getting great uptime, but at least they can get something done. Ultimately this gives management an excuse to lay off all the sysadmins that don't know what /proc is, and make technical decisions based on Gartner reports. Again, that doesn't mean that everyone that has the title of sysadmin in the world can't code or is unproductive: This is not a judgement on the value of a good SA. I am just trying to open a window to a world that many developers get to see, but few good SAs notice, because there's no way in hell a good SA would work in said companies for long.