Yea I think like some the term DevOps makes me cringe as well since people use it as a job title when it should be more thought of like agile development, just

Yea I think like some the term DevOps makes me cringe as well since people use it as a job title when it should be more thought of like agile development, just another term to describe a process of working. I use chef because I needed a way to consistently deploy software in exactly the same way every time to multiple servers. A repeatable deployment process that scales. Why did I pick chef over puppet or cfengine? Because I also wanted to learn ruby and the entire thing is in ruby, win. Plus we have a ruby on rails team in the office, if ever I needed a hand, they were there or if they wanted to write recipes to deploy software thats not an issue either. DevOps is just a new buzz word. My title is System Administrator. I have a depth of knowledge in the infrastructure of all our technologies and how they are interconnected. I know how to deploy, maintain, scale and do it all over again. My knowledge in programming in second to that but is necessary to automate repetitive processes. DevOps I guess is being classed as a way to bring the IT team together, making sys admins and developers aware of each others "agendas" when it comes to running apps on servers. I as a sys admin have to understand what each of our applications does throughout its life cycle, from the browser right down to the database. Because if something goes wrong, I'll be the first to figure out where that happened and relay this back to the developer. By understanding core functionality of the code I can make it clear to the developer, "look you are executing a query on the database thats scanning millions of rows because its not using an index, its occurring in this controller in your code". We are seeing this term DevOps be classified now as more and more startups are emerging, because its essentially alot easier to execute in a startup environment where everyone is talking to each other to roll things out, everyone is trying to solve problems together. In large companies you'll see a massive separation and segregation along with processes to keep people in their place and slow results. I hope that all makes sense. DevOps as a process is not new, the classification of it as this term is.