5 ms·

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.
        parasubvert 8y ago
        I'd posit that b) Consultants (good and bad) always sprout up in any area, and have throughout history (see: Sophists vs. Charlatans). But, what is "fluffy" (ill-defined, nebulous, uncertain, difficult) to one person is a deep area of research for another. Put another way, people tend to dismiss what they don't understand or can't see as unimportant. This is the "looking for your lost keys under the street lamp" syndrome. Most often people can only understand the future in terms of the past, and if they don't have past exposure to a topic, they're not going to see its relevance unless they put extraordinary effort in to pay attention. For example (not necessarily directed at you), Devops folks really put a lot of emphasis on Lean concepts that come out of the Toyota production system. But if I think "wtf do I care about making cars?", I might think ideas like "Continuous Flow" or "Cost of Delay" as being fuzzy and irrelevant to my work as a developer. But they have huge impact over how work is organized and made productive, and literally billions of dollars have been spent developing and honing these ideas in the product manufacturing industries... that just might have broader relevance to the dysfunction of how traditional enterprises run their IT shops vs. how Amazon does. As for c), all ideas are flawed and have unintended consequences :) , focusing too deeply on the negative is a cynical reaction that often gets back to (b).
- markbnj 8y ago
  It's more like experienced devs doing ops in support of devs. As with most terms like this ymmv.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    From some of the folks I was talking to, it seemed more like companies firing their SysAdmins, Release Management, and DBAs and making the developers do the production operations / support.
    - rhlsthrm 8y ago
      Yep, I think it means you can hire one "DevOps Engineer" to do the work of multiple sysadmins/dbas by using these cloud-based services.
- _lflx 8y ago
  DevOps is more like System Administrators doing the work of Software Engineers for half of the money.
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.

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.
      - parasubvert 8y ago
        I'd posit that b) Consultants (good and bad) always sprout up in any area, and have throughout history (see: Sophists vs. Charlatans). But, what is "fluffy" (ill-defined, nebulous, uncertain, difficult) to one person is a deep area of research for another. Put another way, people tend to dismiss what they don't understand or can't see as unimportant. This is the "looking for your lost keys under the street lamp" syndrome. Most often people can only understand the future in terms of the past, and if they don't have past exposure to a topic, they're not going to see its relevance unless they put extraordinary effort in to pay attention. For example (not necessarily directed at you), Devops folks really put a lot of emphasis on Lean concepts that come out of the Toyota production system. But if I think "wtf do I care about making cars?", I might think ideas like "Continuous Flow" or "Cost of Delay" as being fuzzy and irrelevant to my work as a developer. But they have huge impact over how work is organized and made productive, and literally billions of dollars have been spent developing and honing these ideas in the product manufacturing industries... that just might have broader relevance to the dysfunction of how traditional enterprises run their IT shops vs. how Amazon does. As for c), all ideas are flawed and have unintended consequences :) , focusing too deeply on the negative is a cynical reaction that often gets back to (b).
markbnj 8y ago
It's more like experienced devs doing ops in support of devs. As with most terms like this ymmv.
- protomyth 8y ago
  From some of the folks I was talking to, it seemed more like companies firing their SysAdmins, Release Management, and DBAs and making the developers do the production operations / support.
  - rhlsthrm 8y ago
    Yep, I think it means you can hire one "DevOps Engineer" to do the work of multiple sysadmins/dbas by using these cloud-based services.
_lflx 8y ago
DevOps is more like System Administrators doing the work of Software Engineers for half of the money.

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.