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As someone who has a CS degree but who is professionally a systems person, I've been flipflopping continuously on if I even like the term "devops". I'm looking

As someone who has a CS degree but who is professionally a systems person, I've been flipflopping continuously on if I even like the term "devops". I'm looking for someone for my team to fill a "devops" role, and sometimes people talk about it like it's "developer/operations" (someone who can be both a developer and do systems work) and sometimes it's "developer operations" (someone who is a toolsmith just for developers, does release engineering, deployment related work, monitoring and maintenance, doesn't deal with the nittygritty of production systems). Personally, give me a developer who also knows operations and systems maintenance and debugging, or a operations guy who also groks development and the product development lifecycle. Having these roles be distinctly separate people or teams, who don't have experience on the other side, is a gross inefficiency. There's a tendency, as a company grows larger, to separate the concerns. In a smaller company, it's almost necessary to have the same one or two people do both roles (especially in a startup -- your startup's chances of even getting out the gate are reduced if your technology arm only does one or the other). I think some of the increased elitism from the purely developer side comes from the recent perception that "you can get rid of your systems and ops guys because developers can now deploy to the cloud". Elitism exists in some form on the systems and operations side because technical debt is more obviously visible to them (but they are unaware of the history of the reason for much of the technical debt, not having been involved with the product side). The ones who are legitimately elite, because they are on both sides, are also seen as humble because they concentrate on actually solving problems using whichever tools are available from either camp.

gfodor 16y ago
I'm not really sure why "you can get rid of your systems and ops guys because developers can now deploy to the cloud" is elitism, if you take the long view. (Today, yes, you're jumping the gun a bit if you don't think you need ops folks.) We're likely less than 5-10 years away from a world where most operational tasks can be passed on to trusted cloud providers, similar to how you don't wire up your own phone service or plumbing any longer. You still need talented ops people, but they'll be working for a service provider not your own organization.
- thwarted 16y ago
  Except that that isn't currently a long view position. I'm not so sure that comparing systems and operations to wiring up your own phone service or plumbing is appropriate. Those are home, consumer level concerns, but businesses would be wise to have someone on staff, dedicated to understanding their exact needs, rather than attempting to outsource everything, especially during rapid growth. You still need systems experience to know, for example, which of EC2, Softlayer, Media Temple, Engine Yard, or Linode is appropriate, and how to interpret their offerings. Even in 10 years, someone who knows both is going to be more valuable than someone who knows just one. Devops is a different kind of specialization that is actually multidisciplinary. We already have outsourced systems/operations work available as a purchasable service, it's called "Managed Services". Datacenter providers have been trying to upsell to it for years. I used to do managed services at various datacenters, and we all knew we weren't very effective because there was never enough time or money (from the client) to spend on truly understanding their needs.
- mmt 16y ago
  I'm not really sure why "you can get rid of your systems and ops guys because developers can now deploy to the cloud" is elitism I think you answer your own question: you don't wire up your own phone service or plumbing Although linemen and plumbers aren't seen to be in jobs that are menial, you'd have trouble classifying them as elite, compared to their customers[1]. Regardless, the analogy strikes me as tenuous, since plumbing and telephones aren't fundamental to most businesses. On the other hand, computer systems, for a software company, are very much the fundament of what it does. Perhaps a better analogy would be the likes of FedEx or UPS outsourcing the maintenance (and perhaps all operation) of its trucks and planes. I'm pretty confident they keep that in-house. [1] Presumably, this is, predominantly, homeowners and landlords.
  - gfodor 16y ago
    I have a feeling the reason we think racking servers and configuring Apache are fundamental elements for software companies has less to do with reality and more to do with the status quo. The world is going through a phase shift, and each day that goes by trends away from the current model of in-house operations. It's just a matter of how much farther things are going to get before it slows down and stops.

gfodor 16y ago

I'm not really sure why "you can get rid of your systems and ops guys because developers can now deploy to the cloud" is elitism, if you take the long view. (Today, yes, you're jumping the gun a bit if you don't think you need ops folks.) We're likely less than 5-10 years away from a world where most operational tasks can be passed on to trusted cloud providers, similar to how you don't wire up your own phone service or plumbing any longer. You still need talented ops people, but they'll be working for a service provider not your own organization.

thwarted 16y ago
Except that that isn't currently a long view position. I'm not so sure that comparing systems and operations to wiring up your own phone service or plumbing is appropriate. Those are home, consumer level concerns, but businesses would be wise to have someone on staff, dedicated to understanding their exact needs, rather than attempting to outsource everything, especially during rapid growth. You still need systems experience to know, for example, which of EC2, Softlayer, Media Temple, Engine Yard, or Linode is appropriate, and how to interpret their offerings. Even in 10 years, someone who knows both is going to be more valuable than someone who knows just one. Devops is a different kind of specialization that is actually multidisciplinary. We already have outsourced systems/operations work available as a purchasable service, it's called "Managed Services". Datacenter providers have been trying to upsell to it for years. I used to do managed services at various datacenters, and we all knew we weren't very effective because there was never enough time or money (from the client) to spend on truly understanding their needs.
mmt 16y ago
I'm not really sure why "you can get rid of your systems and ops guys because developers can now deploy to the cloud" is elitism I think you answer your own question: you don't wire up your own phone service or plumbing Although linemen and plumbers aren't seen to be in jobs that are menial, you'd have trouble classifying them as elite, compared to their customers[1]. Regardless, the analogy strikes me as tenuous, since plumbing and telephones aren't fundamental to most businesses. On the other hand, computer systems, for a software company, are very much the fundament of what it does. Perhaps a better analogy would be the likes of FedEx or UPS outsourcing the maintenance (and perhaps all operation) of its trucks and planes. I'm pretty confident they keep that in-house. [1] Presumably, this is, predominantly, homeowners and landlords.
- gfodor 16y ago
  I have a feeling the reason we think racking servers and configuring Apache are fundamental elements for software companies has less to do with reality and more to do with the status quo. The world is going through a phase shift, and each day that goes by trends away from the current model of in-house operations. It's just a matter of how much farther things are going to get before it slows down and stops.