> Our system/ops guys (~50 people) are generally smart and nice people - but they're the classic victim Ops dudes that got renamed to DevOps overnight. That's

> Our system/ops guys (~50 people) are generally smart and nice people - but they're the classic victim Ops dudes that got renamed to DevOps overnight. That's just a name change. "DevOps" is just the same system administration as it was for the previous 20 years, the difference is just that now we have more tooling, services, and deployment methods. Why "victim dudes"? > They went from scp'ing bash scripts to bare-metal to AWS and Kuberenetes and all that jazz and are basically "winging it". OK, so they got virtual machines, somebody else's data storage and processing services, and tooling for containers suddenly dropped on their lap, so they need to modernize their craft. And from what you describe, they weren't that good in the craft to begin with (IaaC is an idea twenty years old, the same with packaging software, and just these two techniques can easily handle growth from a few machines to dozens or hundreds). > [...] is this a realistic goal for 1-2 non-ops people to learn and an implement within ~1 year? Probably not. For building a robust infrastructure you need somebody who understands well how the OS and networks work and what mechanisms the OS provides, which usually means a good and experienced sysadmin, not a programmer. It's not impossible for a programmer to learn that, but it requires a good mentor, and then you're still left with an implementation.