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Here's my prediction: DevOps is dead. In 5 to 10 years developers will no longer be mentioned in articles like this. There will be specialisation once again, b

Here's my prediction: DevOps is dead. In 5 to 10 years developers will no longer be mentioned in articles like this. There will be specialisation once again, because it makes absolutely no sense to make people whose main job it is to think about use cases, business logic and user interfaces to also deal with stuff like this.

anothergoogler 8y ago
What does "DevOps is dead" mean?
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  Seems he's essentially just predicting an increase in the division of labor between product development and infrastructure work going forward.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mancerayder 8y ago
    That's interesting, sounds like the world 5 years ago and before -- outside of the Netflix/Google/Facebook monoliths. Sounds like the landscape made systems so complicated via ease of automation that they don't know what's happening under the hood anymore. That's good news for consultants like myself. Sincerely, DevOps guy formerly known as SysEngineer formerly known as SysAdmin for 15+ years.
    - dsmithatx 8y ago
      If you know Ansible/Puppet/Chef K8s platform doesn't require a complicated mess of scripts to manage. Sincerly, Platform Engineer former DevOps guy, former SysEngineer, former SysAdmin for the past 24 years.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  That devs will no longer do ops.
  - optimuspaul 8y ago
    wait, is that what devops means to you? That devs are doing ops?
    - josteink 8y ago
      That is the predominant definition, so yes I would assume just that. It’s more or less a logical following of infrastructure as code, because it’s the developers who write and push those files.
      - parasubvert 8y ago
        If that's the predominant definition, then pretty much everyone that coined the term, written books about it, or run devopsdays events has failed, and we might as well pack up the use of the term. Because not one of them would agree with this. Devops is/was a professional movement to get developers and operations folks to communicate with one another, create a shared value system and culture, drive continuous learning, enhance automation, visibility/metrics, so we can all build software faster safely and sustainably. Infrastructure as code was one small aspect of this. Continuous delivery, microservices, cloud native platforms, a sharing/collaborative culture, lean product development, modern alerting/monitoring, all were part of this. But it seems tech pop culture cliche's win out over best intentions again and again, as they did with 'agile', 'cloud', 'structured programming', 'object oriented programming', 'reactive', and 'REST'
        fauigerzigerk 8y ago
        There are three (non exclusive) variants of this theme. a) The term is misappropriated to refer to some something rather different from what it was originally meant to refer to. I may be guilty of doing that. b) The concept was too fluffy to begin with and sparked a cottage industry for consultants without helping anyone else. c) The original ideas were flawed and have so many unintended consequences in practice that people rightly start associating the term with those negative outcomes instead of the well meaning goals. Perhaps a bit of all the above is what's causing the dissonance here.
- dsmithatx 8y ago
  In Devops ops write infrastructure as code. I'm an old school bash perl sysadmin. Devops with Agile is a cultural shift and has transformed the last 4 companies I've worked at. Two of them having ~100,000 employees. We now do ops with 6-10 people for systems that used to require 100+ people to build and maintain.
cphoover 8y ago
Yes it makes no sense for developers to understand the underlying systems that run their applications. /sarcasm
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Understanding the characteristics of the underlying systems is one thing, but actually building and maintaining them is something completely different.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  You definitely have to have a good knowledge about the underlying system, no doubt. But actually shouldering the burden of creating and maintaining the entire runtime -- and orchestrate it -- is a bit much and stretches people thin.
- lainga 8y ago
  Maybe that's true, but it also makes no sense for me to be interrupted every 15 minutes by someone asking me "I need you to restart your $deployment for something I'm doing" while I'm trying to develop.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    Surely if they need to ask, they should be able to do it themselves?
barrkel 8y ago
K8s establishes a pattern for implementing many ops tasks as controllers rather than scripts or configs. The level of abstraction will be raised, and more and more of the custom hacks specific to individual companies will become modules you deploy on your cluster. In this way, devs will be doing ops, but not as ops for any given prod environment, rather encoding operational tasks in reusable software. Ops themselves will bifurcate, one towards configuring prebuilt controllers, others towards troubleshooting problems in production. The middle ground will hollow out.
dorian-graph 8y ago
This is how we ended up with Electron apps.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  No, that's unfair. User interfaces have always been and will always be a key responsibiliy of developers. Writing native UI code is no more low level than using electron. It's just less familiar to web developers and less portable. These are completely different considerations than the greater degree of division of labour I'm predicting for the server side.
  - rubber_duck 8y ago
    >Writing native UI code is no more low level than using electron. For one JavaScript doesn't have shared memory threads like lower level desktop languages do, it's all neatly hidden in JS event loop or your forced to go IPC route. Shared memory multithreading introduces low level complexity but brings performance benefits if you can leverage it. Plenty of other low level APIs and technologies that you either can't use or are wrapped in higher level sandbox constructs for JS for portability, security, ease of use, whatever. Writing native UI code often forces you to deal with low level platform specifics but you get the benefits, HTML UI is just a cheap way to do it (not meant in a derogatory way - it's easy to find devs/designers and target multiple platforms from same code base)
- jimmy1 8y ago
  VSCode is an electron app and it's pretty amazing.
solomatov 8y ago
Another prediction in 5 to 10 years infrastructure will be so streamlined, so that developers won't need to think it at all. I see the progress when we cam from manually maintained machines, to clumsy devops tools, to more streamlined dev tools like ansible, to kubernetes, and with each new step, maintaining a system requires less and less expertise.
- pishpash 8y ago
  Exactly. It will be as simple as working with one machine (long overdue), when developers never needed help.
- zapt02 8y ago
  Have you used the AWS interface lately? It's getting further and further away from being streamlined.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    AWS is legacy. That's why Kubernetes has uptake. They are in danger of becoming a rack provider if this continues. Their managed applications still have a place, but with third parties, they might become a glorified cloud app store, which they might desire anyway.
    - zapt02 8y ago
      I haven't worked with Kubernetes but I have worked a lot with Docker. Building your containers is difficult, using existing containers has a bunch of gotchas and getting your containers up and running anywhere resembling a production environment is a giant hassle. I think containers is the future but we need idiot-proof GUI systems that Heroku and similar services provide to wire up our applications, and we need a good way to handle persistence, which many modern tools ignore.
    - parasubvert 8y ago
      This reminds me of the OpenStack Hubris, wherein they would dictate requirements to AWS due to the sheer momentum of the community. Uh, nope. Kubernetes' uptake is nowhere close to AWS by any measure. And AWS is the #1 public cloud that hosts Kubernetes workloads. It's every IT vendor in the world vs. AWS, and so far, they're winning. Kubernetes and open platforms have a shot, but they're not moving fast enough yet in the direction that matters - up the stack.
parasubvert 8y ago
Your broader point is correct but I think you're mischaracterizing Devops (which isn't about developers doing this stuff, it's about a continuously improving culture + technology to support end-to-end delivery and operations) But more broadly, Kubernetes in the hands of most developers that are doing non-platform level work is a step backwards and will be disastrous. It's far too low level, it's like, hey this Python/Ruby/Java thing was great, but have you seen this new bytecode linker and assembler? New platforms and runtime built ON TOP OF Kubernetes are probably going to be fine. But that's going to take a while.
- chris_mc 8y ago
  >Your broader point is correct but I think you're mischaracterizing Devops (which isn't about developers doing this stuff, it's about a continuously improving culture + technology to support end-to-end delivery and operations) Everyone who comments about DevOps should have read "The Phoenix Project" first, so that they understand what you just said. It's not about consolidating workloads onto generalists, it's supposed to be about breaking down the silos in an organization, nothing more!
  - zeckalpha 8y ago
    Which they barely did in Phoenix Project toward the end. The first part was building silos to slow the input and reduce work in progress.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  >Your broader point is correct but I think you're mischaracterizing Devops You are right. What I should have said is that using DevOps as an excuse to make application developers do complex infrastructure design, automation and maintainance as a side-job is an unsustainable practice.
  - halbritt 8y ago
    Indeed. That's why Google has SRE and Facebook has Production Engineering, and so on.
amorousf00p 8y ago
I think devops was defunct once the asphalt hit the hardpan. Approaching 'generic' secure operational environments as programmable, iterable and contained is one of the great IT lies of the last 20 years.
pjmlp 8y ago
You are quite right, I already have to jungle .NET, Java/Android, C++, SQL, Web on my head, don't need this as well.
tormeh 8y ago
There's a lot of benefits to having the same people doing a lot of stuff (see also full-stack devs). It means that someone has an overview of things and have situational awareness. Without generalists with overview and situational awareness, you're going to need a lot of documentation, paperwork and meetings to preempt communication problems.

anothergoogler 8y ago

What does "DevOps is dead" mean?

mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
Seems he's essentially just predicting an increase in the division of labor between product development and infrastructure work going forward.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mancerayder 8y ago
  That's interesting, sounds like the world 5 years ago and before -- outside of the Netflix/Google/Facebook monoliths. Sounds like the landscape made systems so complicated via ease of automation that they don't know what's happening under the hood anymore. That's good news for consultants like myself. Sincerely, DevOps guy formerly known as SysEngineer formerly known as SysAdmin for 15+ years.
  - dsmithatx 8y ago
    If you know Ansible/Puppet/Chef K8s platform doesn't require a complicated mess of scripts to manage. Sincerly, Platform Engineer former DevOps guy, former SysEngineer, former SysAdmin for the past 24 years.
fauigerzigerk 8y ago
That devs will no longer do ops.
- optimuspaul 8y ago
  wait, is that what devops means to you? That devs are doing ops?
  - josteink 8y ago
    That is the predominant definition, so yes I would assume just that. It’s more or less a logical following of infrastructure as code, because it’s the developers who write and push those files.
    - parasubvert 8y ago
      If that's the predominant definition, then pretty much everyone that coined the term, written books about it, or run devopsdays events has failed, and we might as well pack up the use of the term. Because not one of them would agree with this. Devops is/was a professional movement to get developers and operations folks to communicate with one another, create a shared value system and culture, drive continuous learning, enhance automation, visibility/metrics, so we can all build software faster safely and sustainably. Infrastructure as code was one small aspect of this. Continuous delivery, microservices, cloud native platforms, a sharing/collaborative culture, lean product development, modern alerting/monitoring, all were part of this. But it seems tech pop culture cliche's win out over best intentions again and again, as they did with 'agile', 'cloud', 'structured programming', 'object oriented programming', 'reactive', and 'REST'
      - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
        There are three (non exclusive) variants of this theme. a) The term is misappropriated to refer to some something rather different from what it was originally meant to refer to. I may be guilty of doing that. b) The concept was too fluffy to begin with and sparked a cottage industry for consultants without helping anyone else. c) The original ideas were flawed and have so many unintended consequences in practice that people rightly start associating the term with those negative outcomes instead of the well meaning goals. Perhaps a bit of all the above is what's causing the dissonance here.
dsmithatx 8y ago
In Devops ops write infrastructure as code. I'm an old school bash perl sysadmin. Devops with Agile is a cultural shift and has transformed the last 4 companies I've worked at. Two of them having ~100,000 employees. We now do ops with 6-10 people for systems that used to require 100+ people to build and maintain.

cphoover 8y ago

Yes it makes no sense for developers to understand the underlying systems that run their applications. /sarcasm

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
Understanding the characteristics of the underlying systems is one thing, but actually building and maintaining them is something completely different.
pdimitar 8y ago
You definitely have to have a good knowledge about the underlying system, no doubt. But actually shouldering the burden of creating and maintaining the entire runtime -- and orchestrate it -- is a bit much and stretches people thin.
lainga 8y ago
Maybe that's true, but it also makes no sense for me to be interrupted every 15 minutes by someone asking me "I need you to restart your $deployment for something I'm doing" while I'm trying to develop.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  Surely if they need to ask, they should be able to do it themselves?

barrkel 8y ago

K8s establishes a pattern for implementing many ops tasks as controllers rather than scripts or configs. The level of abstraction will be raised, and more and more of the custom hacks specific to individual companies will become modules you deploy on your cluster. In this way, devs will be doing ops, but not as ops for any given prod environment, rather encoding operational tasks in reusable software. Ops themselves will bifurcate, one towards configuring prebuilt controllers, others towards troubleshooting problems in production. The middle ground will hollow out.

dorian-graph 8y ago

This is how we ended up with Electron apps.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
No, that's unfair. User interfaces have always been and will always be a key responsibiliy of developers. Writing native UI code is no more low level than using electron. It's just less familiar to web developers and less portable. These are completely different considerations than the greater degree of division of labour I'm predicting for the server side.
- rubber_duck 8y ago
  >Writing native UI code is no more low level than using electron. For one JavaScript doesn't have shared memory threads like lower level desktop languages do, it's all neatly hidden in JS event loop or your forced to go IPC route. Shared memory multithreading introduces low level complexity but brings performance benefits if you can leverage it. Plenty of other low level APIs and technologies that you either can't use or are wrapped in higher level sandbox constructs for JS for portability, security, ease of use, whatever. Writing native UI code often forces you to deal with low level platform specifics but you get the benefits, HTML UI is just a cheap way to do it (not meant in a derogatory way - it's easy to find devs/designers and target multiple platforms from same code base)
jimmy1 8y ago
VSCode is an electron app and it's pretty amazing.

solomatov 8y ago

Another prediction in 5 to 10 years infrastructure will be so streamlined, so that developers won't need to think it at all. I see the progress when we cam from manually maintained machines, to clumsy devops tools, to more streamlined dev tools like ansible, to kubernetes, and with each new step, maintaining a system requires less and less expertise.

pishpash 8y ago
Exactly. It will be as simple as working with one machine (long overdue), when developers never needed help.
zapt02 8y ago
Have you used the AWS interface lately? It's getting further and further away from being streamlined.
- pishpash 8y ago
  AWS is legacy. That's why Kubernetes has uptake. They are in danger of becoming a rack provider if this continues. Their managed applications still have a place, but with third parties, they might become a glorified cloud app store, which they might desire anyway.
  - zapt02 8y ago
    I haven't worked with Kubernetes but I have worked a lot with Docker. Building your containers is difficult, using existing containers has a bunch of gotchas and getting your containers up and running anywhere resembling a production environment is a giant hassle. I think containers is the future but we need idiot-proof GUI systems that Heroku and similar services provide to wire up our applications, and we need a good way to handle persistence, which many modern tools ignore.
  - parasubvert 8y ago
    This reminds me of the OpenStack Hubris, wherein they would dictate requirements to AWS due to the sheer momentum of the community. Uh, nope. Kubernetes' uptake is nowhere close to AWS by any measure. And AWS is the #1 public cloud that hosts Kubernetes workloads. It's every IT vendor in the world vs. AWS, and so far, they're winning. Kubernetes and open platforms have a shot, but they're not moving fast enough yet in the direction that matters - up the stack.

parasubvert 8y ago

Your broader point is correct but I think you're mischaracterizing Devops (which isn't about developers doing this stuff, it's about a continuously improving culture + technology to support end-to-end delivery and operations) But more broadly, Kubernetes in the hands of most developers that are doing non-platform level work is a step backwards and will be disastrous. It's far too low level, it's like, hey this Python/Ruby/Java thing was great, but have you seen this new bytecode linker and assembler? New platforms and runtime built ON TOP OF Kubernetes are probably going to be fine. But that's going to take a while.

chris_mc 8y ago
>Your broader point is correct but I think you're mischaracterizing Devops (which isn't about developers doing this stuff, it's about a continuously improving culture + technology to support end-to-end delivery and operations) Everyone who comments about DevOps should have read "The Phoenix Project" first, so that they understand what you just said. It's not about consolidating workloads onto generalists, it's supposed to be about breaking down the silos in an organization, nothing more!
- zeckalpha 8y ago
  Which they barely did in Phoenix Project toward the end. The first part was building silos to slow the input and reduce work in progress.
fauigerzigerk 8y ago
>Your broader point is correct but I think you're mischaracterizing Devops You are right. What I should have said is that using DevOps as an excuse to make application developers do complex infrastructure design, automation and maintainance as a side-job is an unsustainable practice.
- halbritt 8y ago
  Indeed. That's why Google has SRE and Facebook has Production Engineering, and so on.

amorousf00p 8y ago

I think devops was defunct once the asphalt hit the hardpan. Approaching 'generic' secure operational environments as programmable, iterable and contained is one of the great IT lies of the last 20 years.

pjmlp 8y ago

You are quite right, I already have to jungle .NET, Java/Android, C++, SQL, Web on my head, don't need this as well.

tormeh 8y ago

There's a lot of benefits to having the same people doing a lot of stuff (see also full-stack devs). It means that someone has an overview of things and have situational awareness. Without generalists with overview and situational awareness, you're going to need a lot of documentation, paperwork and meetings to preempt communication problems.