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You can't just rename your IT Ops team and call it DevOps

134 points by gk1 7y ago

idclip 7y ago
Or call technical customer support Devops. Which also contains the Ops team, which has recently been renamed Devops.
briffle 7y ago
Of course not, you need to install Jira as well, so your now Agile.. I was going to use a sarcasm tag, except that is pretty much what my last employer did...
- sonofgod 7y ago
  I've had "here is an install of Jira, go play" with no configuration done or any admin existing too. My greatest achievement in that job was making production a git repo so that we could regards against production before pushing. A sufficiently low bar you'll trip over it.
- jdjdjjsjs 7y ago
  That's what my employer also did. In addition to a lot of metrics on which they base performance and awards. In other words easily and frequently gameable made up numbers
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
My recent experience in interviewing candidates is that they have all heard the word "DevOps" but what they understand by it is highly variable, and ranges from from a way of working, to a build pipeline in Azure to ... yup, a renamed Ops team. It's pretty sad.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > some build pipelines in Azure Azure Devops Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/devops/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/devops/ Since there can't be a successful software delivery method that doesn't involve releasing software, the act of releasing software _cannot_ be new and unique to "DevOps". IMO the new factor is in closing the feedback loop with the final link from live Operations back to Development, therefor if part of your cloud stack _must_ be singled out as the "DevOps" part, it's probably the logging / metrics / observability / alerting piece that does this, and not the good old CI and deploy pipelines.
- user5994461 7y ago
  It's a pretty good progression from before. The most common name used to be sysadmin. That could be development or operations or anything down to running a Windows Active Directory or HelpDesk. At least with DevOps, there is no doubt that it's about Linux systems and automation.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
    > At least with DevOps, there is no doubt that it's about Linux systems and automation. Is that what you understand by the term "Devops" ? That "it's about Linux systems" ? Really?? That definition is a new one on me, and you very much should doubt it since "it's about Linux systems" is neither necessary nor sufficient. The confusion is even worse than I thought.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      Are you trying a joke on Linux vs Unix? in reference to companies using Solaris or FreeBSD maybe? (there aren't many left of those). All the DevOps roles I've ever seen are Unix based. In my experience sysadmin roles were more likely to be a windows administration or a helpdesk role than that. I think it's pretty good devops got split into a distinct title. It's not a great experience walking into a sysadmin interview only to find out they are looking for an exchange administrator.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
        > Are you trying a joke on Linux vs Unix? No, I'm saying the the DevOps ideas have nothing to do with OS choice. You could use them in linux or Windows or in any other OS; or you could ignore them in linux or Windows or any other OS.
  - will4274 7y ago
    > At least with DevOps, there is no doubt that it's about Linux systems and automation. Windows Server still exists and maintains some market share. Automated, continuous delivery, and monitoring of web applications to Windows Server machines is DevOps in the exact same sense that it is with Linux machines. The essence of DevOps is that there's no fence. The same team that writes the code deploys and monitors it. This essence remains unchanged regardless of the hosting platform - Linux, Windows, or even proprietary platforms like AWS lambda.
gk1 7y ago
Hard to believe (or maybe not?) there's still ambiguity around "DevOps" so many years after its introduction. And with ModelOps, DevSecOps, AIOps, GregOps, and GitOps recently entering the lexicon brace yourself for lots of confusion and "xOps explained" articles ahead. By the way, one of those xOps isn't real, but who can even tell?
- sonofgod 7y ago
  I'm assuming it's GregOps, because GreggsOps is HugOps with bonus vegan* sausage rolls. :P * vegan optional
  - PascLeRasc 7y ago
    It's actually been going by GregoryOps lately.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > still ambiguity around "DevOps" so many years after its introduction. With these things, the ambiguity ramps up over time. e.g. "Agile" used to be well-defined. Now it means almost anything, or nothing.
- Ascetik 7y ago
  >DevSecOps I hadn't heard this term until very recently when SaltStack started pushing their enterprise suite hard in the security direction, and I facepalmed.
azaras 7y ago
IT fashion: out: DevOps in: SRE
- fteem 7y ago
  Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqJrKl7D2u-gmis8h9K66qoj https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqJrKl7D2u-g...
- itronitron 7y ago
  which one of those has the most cloud?
- jimbokun 7y ago
  At least SRE has a working definition, which is the set of practices laid out in the Google SRE book. Defining DevOps is the proverbial blind men describing an elephant.
avtomer 7y ago
Super interesting and relevant. Thanks!
utopian3 7y ago
I've met many smart people from large enterprises who said, "I'm the DevOps [guy|team|person]" with a straight face. Generally, I believe they know it's wrong, but their leadership didn't, and they were just eager to move the needle a little bit that they accepted.
dopylitty 7y ago
Of course not. You also need to lay off your entire testing team and rename the IT Ops team DevTestOps.
caymanjim 7y ago
DevOps is a horribly misapplied term. I recently referred to a client systems administrator as a "sysadmin", because they were doing sysadmin things: provisioning and configuring production hardware, networking, backups, databases, etc. I was chastised by the [much-younger-than-I] CTO, who said he "hadn't heard the term sysadmin in 20 years" and that they were the DevOps team. No, sorry. They were sysadmins. DevOps is valuable role, and I'm glad there's a focus on supporting developers and their needs, and in empowering developers to manage their own build and deployment infrastructure. In a larger organization, having a dedicated person or team working closely with developers on software build, test, and deployment automation is great. But if your job is maintaining production hardware, network, operating system, DNS, SSL certificates, firewalls, backups, etc., then you're a sysadmin. It's not a pejorative term. In a small organization, or within a team, that may be combined with a DevOps role. You may even have one person who maintains all your infrastructure for production and development, and even doubles as a developer. That still doesn't mean you label the entire role DevOps.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Depends on the Sysadmin :-) and the sort of Job I was hired as a dual Sysad/developer years ago as an explicit DevOps role (before devops was a thing) The team (telecoms billing systems) was also uncertain that the actual ops team could provide the required service.
- user5994461 7y ago
  A sysadmin is the person who setup the windows machines and the printers. If you're working with Linux systems and automating stuff, make yourself a favor and call yourself a DevOps.
  - bsagdiyev 7y ago
    I automate and work with Linux systems and I still consider myself a sysadmin -- I'm not DevOps, I'm not an SRE. My skillset and experience might coincide with what those roles require, but I am and always will be a sysadmin in my mind. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't make it a supermodel.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
peteretep 7y ago
*shouldn’t
rospaya 7y ago
Oh, another person telling the world what devops means. If we take the 50 thousand or so other blog posts about the definition of devops and glue them together - it means whatever you want. Ops teams doing some code, devs building CI/CD infrastructure, whatever.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > another person telling the world what devops means....- it means whatever you want. I think that devops (like agile) will have a definite meaning, but uncovering that is mostly a process of examining the early history of it - who first used it and when? The definitions used, the problems that it aimed to solve, and the methods used to solve them. However, like "agile" it can and often is abused to mean everything and nothing. This does not make it inherently meaningless, though.
oweiler 7y ago
There is no DevOps role. There is no DevOps team. Devs doing Ops != DevOps. DevOps is about tearing down silos (Dev and Ops), not creating new ones.
- levythe 7y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks like this. Every time I read someone referring to, "a DevOps," I wonder what they think they're referring to. No one person is going to be everything you need for effective development and operations combined outside of small, extremely focused scope. DevOps is about avoiding the, "Just throw it over the wall," mentality, not making one person handle the whole thing.
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    >I wonder what they think they're referring to This and >DevOps is about avoiding the, "Just throw it over the wall," mentality, not making one person handle the whole thing. this are why it's now part of my interview process when I'm interviewing for a new role "how does your company/team define DevOps?" and I listen very closely for things that sound like 'over the wall-Ops'. Admittedly having the fortune at this point in life to be quite judicious about the answers given. Ostensibly, if I'm applying for a 'DevOps' role, I shouldn't have to do this if the job description is written well enough, yet even then this has become a learned behavior even when coming across the rare well-articulated job req.
- empath75 7y ago
  While I largely agree with that, I think it’s arguable that there are a set of technologies that enable that style of working, and that you can call an engineer that specializing in supporting those tools a devops engineer, and a team that supports them a devops team. Having devops teams and engineers isn’t the same as practicing devops, but once you scale up your org, you’re going to end up with them, anyway. For example, someone who is good with ci/cd pipelines, infra as code and just generally in automation and observability, as opposed to someone who is strong with linux internals or JavaScript You can tear down silos all you want, but everybody can’t know everything and people will always specialize.
ldoughty 7y ago
You also can't just rename your Dev team DevOps... Ops people come from a background favoring stability, security, and connecting components. Developers come from using new and great tools... Writing the connections between their own systems, and following API docs of their partners. Ops people usually have less CS training, and developers frequently don't understand security aspects of running systems or containers. You should merge the teams, not drop additional responsibility's on one side or the other that are outside their training/experience
- techops 7y ago
  Please be careful with the prejudices here around the CS knowledge of operations professionals. As a computer scientist who builds software for operations automation, I often find that developers work in interpreted or virtual execution environments and have little understanding of the underlying execution infrastructure or even the compiled environments that execute their code. The ops team understands throughput, I agree that cross-training and shared responsibility for both success and support are critical for success -- regardless of labels put on people and teams.
soneca 7y ago
Interesting, in my last company the team themselves thought DevOps was not a role, but more a responsibility that should be shared among all devs and they renamed themselves "Production Engineering". They said it was admittedly not the best, clearest of the names, but the important thing is that DevOps should be shared, not owned. As a dev, it made a lot of sense to me
- phlakaton 7y ago
  > They renamed themselves "Production Engineering" That jibes with my experience, where there has generally been one or more groups that build and maintain infrastructure to enable dev teams to build, deploy, monitor, etc. But what do you call it? It's not a DevOps role per se, nor really an Ops role, but it enables DevOps. We called it Platform, but said we were hiring DevOps engineers. In short: it's a mess. :-)
  - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
    That role /team is real, especially in larger orgs, and a better name for it is "platform" / "platform team" / "platform engineering" not "DevOps". If you must call it "DevOps", it is "Devops enablement team", i.e. supplying a platform to enable dev teams to better Develop, build, deploy, monitor, Operate what they make, themselves - enabling others to do DevOps by supplying tools. See: https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/platform-engineering-product-teams https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/platform-engin... https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-platform-team-now-the-secrets-to-successful-engineering-8a9b6a4d2c8 https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-platform-team-now-the-...
rhoyerboat 7y ago
Agreed, but, perhaps, as a management strategy, it may help some teams transition. Since after all, for folks with careers in manual provisioning, devops truly is a new frame of mind.. swapping words in titles around is just part of operations development? :)
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Maybe people shouldn’t get stuck up that much about words. Unfortunately they are so it’s smart to attach yourself to the currently fashionable title. If you do something with dev tools call yourself “devops”. If you run a few database queries better call yourself “data scientist “. And if your current buzzword falls out of favor then don’t change your work but find a new fashionable label. It’s an unfortunate state of the industry that we put value and prestige into ill defined labels.
thrower123 7y ago
DevOps, like most IT fads, is just trying to get more blood out of the stone and avoid letting anyone specialize in anything. That's obviously not the original intent, but it's what happens.
cletus 7y ago
If you can rename "statistics" to "machine learning" and "data analyst" to "data scientist" [1], I don't see why you can't rename "IT Ops" to "Dev Ops". [1] If you haven't heard it, there's a joke: Q: What's the difference between a data analyst and a data scientist? A: The data scientist lives in San Francisco
- CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
  The distinguishing factor between those two roles that I have noticed is data scientists build predictive models and use statistics somehow, while analysts are relegated to the 'grunt' work like cleaning data, building reports, etc. Analysts are typically working to become data scientists. I only have 5 years of work experience at 2 companies, so I'm sure results vary. I make sure not to make any assumptions when I hear either title, however, I've met incompetent 'data scientists' and brilliant 'analysts'.
at_a_remove 7y ago
I had this happen to me from the other end. I was the lone programmer (and my title reflected that). After a new hire, I was told that I was some kind of engineer because my title had changed to that and that we are now DevOps, hooray! Not coincidentally, this was to be my final awful Agile experience. The thing is, I am not gifted in the area of system administration. I am not too shabby at it in Windows, quite pathetic in Linux, but being a sysadmin was a role I had escaped for a reason. And suddenly I am back in it. I am a very low-tooling programmer. Just let me stick my hands in the data and go away. I have great respect for people who are system administrators but it is a job where my talents lie below my meager skills, and my inclination far below that. Meanwhile, the true system administrators, who had been doing that for quite some time, had been denied the actual title for some time, were going to be moved over just as ... bodies, I guess, to elsewhere. All just ... DevOps now or whatever. What a trainwreck.
esotericn 7y ago
Role names in most software companies that I've worked at and know of are almost completely arbitrary. They're useful if you have an organization that pays a specific rate for a specific job title, and they're useful in a hierarchical sense (e.g. managers, CTOs, etc). That's about it. I install and maintain servers and desktops, databases, run backups, build infrastructure, source control servers, do low level programming, high level programming, frontend, backend, ... etc, it's too long to even enumerate. As far as I'm concerned that's just being a (non-junior) software developer. It's all ultimately the same thing with different names to me, barely anywhere really needs people who are at the forefront in a tiny niche (i.e. _real_ specialists). You can call me whatever you want as long as you're paying the bills.
systematical 7y ago
How is such a thin article upvoted? That was basically a verbose tweet.
- elm_ 7y ago
  It's funny - recently on HN I've seen posts that are a small twitter thread: "Why isn't this a blog post?!" Someone writes a short blog post, and... "That was basically a verbose tweet." ️
- gtirloni 7y ago
  Because some people find that it's a good topic to be discussed here. Or they want to +1 the idea. Or... Who knows. I've upvoted bad articles because the discussion they triggered was very interesting.
- insomniacity 7y ago
  Because really you're supposed to click the link in the article and listen to the interview.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    If TFA contained a transcript it might have been worth an upvote...
    - neonate 7y ago
      Looks like there's a transcript here: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SED771-Datree.pdf https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019...
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        Now that could get an upvote!
      - l0b0 7y ago
        Can we replace the original link with either this or the audio?
jacobsenscott 7y ago
Wait, nobody ever named a team "IT Ops".
rubyfan 7y ago
At public corporations (especially regulated) there are confounding factors that make DevOps a farce. For example audit, a point of view that IT is a cost center, and the non technical management decision making that go along with the previous challenge the spirit and proper execution to get DevOps right. But in reality DevOps is a symptom of a larger issue - functional reporting structures and goal misalignment. Audit - the idea that your developer doesn’t have access to production systems and data is a challenge to DevOps. The idea that one person codes and one deploys can be a challenge. Some organizations like management visibility and an audit trail to prove it - this can challenge automation and frequent deployment. This is not just a DevOps issue, audit expectations for business requirements and QA signoff can be just as bad. Admittedly some of the audit rules are relics of the past but the need to be addressed in order for DevOps practices (and really for agile teams to be agile. In organizations where IT is a supporting function of the business there is a view point that it’s a cost center only and doesn’t produce value and should be cost controlled and managed to ultimate efficiency. I’ve reminded CIOs that the work the IT team does is not “a factory” as they sometimes insist on calling it - no one in technology that I’ve ever met (except management) really wants to think they work in a factory. The efficiency mindset rank orders roles with QA and analysts at the bottom, devops slightly higher, developers relatively high, architects at the top of the skilled food chain and management of course at the top. To some degree these functions can be centralized so they can be optimized and made efficient. Centralizing typically means you work for management rather than a particular business mission. Your job is to make management look good and keep everything running smoothly (remember you work in a factory). Management generally looks good when quality is achieved at a lower price point. Along with that tends to be a higher level of off shoring at the lower end of the skill rank where larger numbers means more efficiency at lower cost. Here lies the problem - the premise of DevOps is that the role is integrated in the team. When DevOps is a function reporting to management then their goals aren’t aligned to the development team. They might not even sit with the team and they might have their own orders. They might be in a 12-20 hour time zone offset. To me the larger issue is management structures aligned by function instead of business. This leads to misalignment if goals and ultimately lack of integration in functions. It’s a bigger problem than DevOps and it’s a bigger problem than IT. I think the companies that get management reporting right will win in the end. I am curious to see how Google and Amazon respond to these issues at their scale. The pizza team doesn’t work when everyone has different goals.
farisjarrah 7y ago
> You can't just rename your IT Ops team and call it DevOps Sure you can. Companies can and will do whatever they want. It may not be semantically correct, but it definitely wont stop anyone. Just go on indeed and look up "DevOps jobs" and you'll see many companies who have done just that.
jasoneckert 7y ago
The sad reality in most organizations today is that buzz words are applied to existing jobs to make it look like progress. So yes, apparently you can rename your IT Ops team to DevOps and brag about "how you engaged your teams to move to a DevOps focus to better align them with company values while leveraging the low-hanging fruit within today's shifting economy" during an executive management meeting.
supercommand 7y ago
Cloud engineer. Network engineer. Software engineer.... I’ve never heard of medstudents calling themselves doctors, why do cs students/grads get a pass? Up next chefs will be food engineers, tailors will be clothing engineers, and because I changed the oil in my Toyota once, I’m now a Toyota engineer; specializing in fluids. Words mean literally nothing anymore (ha). Titles in tech are hilarious at almost every level, especially from the outside looking in.
- klodolph 7y ago
  This argument gets rehashed in HN pretty often. When I just worked in ops or support my job title had the word “technician” in it. When I was designing systems my job title had the word “engineer” in it, even if I also had ops duties. As far as I can tell this is a regional thing, where certain jurisdictions have laws that regulate who can call themselves engineers, just like certain jurisdictions have laws about who can call themselves hairdressers. That doesn’t stop people on HN from thinking that for some reason, we can all agree on a definition for “engineer”, even though we have regular disagreements about the definition about almost every other word in the English language. “DevOps” is at least ill-defined from the very start, so if we have arguments about what “DevOps” means, at least I can learn something.
- jldugger 7y ago
  Well, at a certain level it applies. Part of doing my job well involves designing service quality checks. That requires: 1. understanding important engineering principals like queuing theory 2. understanding the system in question well enough to modify it to emit relevant metrics for applying stuff like queuing theory 3. collecting this data into timeseries form 4. applying statistical tests to them, e.g. for normality. 5. deciding between a variety of possible anomaly detection algorithms Another portion involves capacity planning and datacenter design, which requires a certain amount of electrical engineering knowledge, as well as forecasting. A different part of my job simply involves writing software, testing it, and signing off on changes. Overall it sounds fairly engineery, even if the powers that be would rather prefer it if the term be reserved those who pass an internship and test (but then refuse to expand said test to include new domains).
- 7y ago
kazinator 7y ago
DevOps means "the build and continuous integration system is so complicated, it needs dedicated people who have software dev credentials".
mindcrime 7y ago
Yep. Similar notion applies with "Agile" -- you can't just throw out all requirements analysis, up-front design, and architecture work, and say "We're Agile". But people do it all the time, because they're enthralled with the buzzword and not the actual meaning behind the buzzword. Same applies for ( Agile | Devops | $WHATEVER). And the sad thing is, this in turn devalues the original idea and causes a backlash where people throw the baby out because somebody crapped in the bathwater.
- DataWorker 7y ago
  It’s how tech and capitalism interface. The $whatever is actively marketed, the profits are arbitrage between the true value of the thing and the perception of the value. Since that value perception is easy to manipulate with network effects, and true innovation much more difficult, we then become stagnant. Maybe this is why we don’t see much productivity for the past several decades. Productivity gains are never realized because the tech stays constant while perceptions are maneuvered for profit. One reason China may win; less respect for IP.
iio7 7y ago
I'm so sick of all this hyped up bullshit! Someone who administers systems is a system administrator and someone who develops is a programmer. And in my 30+ years in the business I haven't seen a single BSD or Linux system administrator who couldn't also program in C or some other language.
purplezooey 7y ago
"...not about hiring a 'DevOps guy'" Yet, this is one of the most common scenarios I've seen. "Oh, this guy/gal started devops at Xyz company.".

134 points by gk1 7y ago

Or call technical customer support Devops. Which also contains the Ops team, which has recently been renamed Devops.

Of course not, you need to install Jira as well, so your now Agile.. I was going to use a sarcasm tag, except that is pretty much what my last employer did...

sonofgod 7y ago
I've had "here is an install of Jira, go play" with no configuration done or any admin existing too. My greatest achievement in that job was making production a git repo so that we could regards against production before pushing. A sufficiently low bar you'll trip over it.
jdjdjjsjs 7y ago
That's what my employer also did. In addition to a lot of metrics on which they base performance and awards. In other words easily and frequently gameable made up numbers

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago

My recent experience in interviewing candidates is that they have all heard the word "DevOps" but what they understand by it is highly variable, and ranges from from a way of working, to a build pipeline in Azure to ... yup, a renamed Ops team. It's pretty sad.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> some build pipelines in Azure Azure Devops Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/devops/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/devops/ Since there can't be a successful software delivery method that doesn't involve releasing software, the act of releasing software _cannot_ be new and unique to "DevOps". IMO the new factor is in closing the feedback loop with the final link from live Operations back to Development, therefor if part of your cloud stack _must_ be singled out as the "DevOps" part, it's probably the logging / metrics / observability / alerting piece that does this, and not the good old CI and deploy pipelines.
user5994461 7y ago
It's a pretty good progression from before. The most common name used to be sysadmin. That could be development or operations or anything down to running a Windows Active Directory or HelpDesk. At least with DevOps, there is no doubt that it's about Linux systems and automation.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > At least with DevOps, there is no doubt that it's about Linux systems and automation. Is that what you understand by the term "Devops" ? That "it's about Linux systems" ? Really?? That definition is a new one on me, and you very much should doubt it since "it's about Linux systems" is neither necessary nor sufficient. The confusion is even worse than I thought.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Are you trying a joke on Linux vs Unix? in reference to companies using Solaris or FreeBSD maybe? (there aren't many left of those). All the DevOps roles I've ever seen are Unix based. In my experience sysadmin roles were more likely to be a windows administration or a helpdesk role than that. I think it's pretty good devops got split into a distinct title. It's not a great experience walking into a sysadmin interview only to find out they are looking for an exchange administrator.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
      > Are you trying a joke on Linux vs Unix? No, I'm saying the the DevOps ideas have nothing to do with OS choice. You could use them in linux or Windows or in any other OS; or you could ignore them in linux or Windows or any other OS.
- will4274 7y ago
  > At least with DevOps, there is no doubt that it's about Linux systems and automation. Windows Server still exists and maintains some market share. Automated, continuous delivery, and monitoring of web applications to Windows Server machines is DevOps in the exact same sense that it is with Linux machines. The essence of DevOps is that there's no fence. The same team that writes the code deploys and monitors it. This essence remains unchanged regardless of the hosting platform - Linux, Windows, or even proprietary platforms like AWS lambda.

gk1 7y ago

Hard to believe (or maybe not?) there's still ambiguity around "DevOps" so many years after its introduction. And with ModelOps, DevSecOps, AIOps, GregOps, and GitOps recently entering the lexicon brace yourself for lots of confusion and "xOps explained" articles ahead. By the way, one of those xOps isn't real, but who can even tell?

sonofgod 7y ago
I'm assuming it's GregOps, because GreggsOps is HugOps with bonus vegan* sausage rolls. :P * vegan optional
- PascLeRasc 7y ago
  It's actually been going by GregoryOps lately.
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> still ambiguity around "DevOps" so many years after its introduction. With these things, the ambiguity ramps up over time. e.g. "Agile" used to be well-defined. Now it means almost anything, or nothing.
Ascetik 7y ago
>DevSecOps I hadn't heard this term until very recently when SaltStack started pushing their enterprise suite hard in the security direction, and I facepalmed.

azaras 7y ago

IT fashion: out: DevOps in: SRE

fteem 7y ago
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqJrKl7D2u-gmis8h9K66qoj https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqJrKl7D2u-g...
itronitron 7y ago
which one of those has the most cloud?
jimbokun 7y ago
At least SRE has a working definition, which is the set of practices laid out in the Google SRE book. Defining DevOps is the proverbial blind men describing an elephant.

avtomer 7y ago

Super interesting and relevant. Thanks!

utopian3 7y ago

I've met many smart people from large enterprises who said, "I'm the DevOps [guy|team|person]" with a straight face. Generally, I believe they know it's wrong, but their leadership didn't, and they were just eager to move the needle a little bit that they accepted.

dopylitty 7y ago

Of course not. You also need to lay off your entire testing team and rename the IT Ops team DevTestOps.

caymanjim 7y ago

DevOps is a horribly misapplied term. I recently referred to a client systems administrator as a "sysadmin", because they were doing sysadmin things: provisioning and configuring production hardware, networking, backups, databases, etc. I was chastised by the [much-younger-than-I] CTO, who said he "hadn't heard the term sysadmin in 20 years" and that they were the DevOps team. No, sorry. They were sysadmins. DevOps is valuable role, and I'm glad there's a focus on supporting developers and their needs, and in empowering developers to manage their own build and deployment infrastructure. In a larger organization, having a dedicated person or team working closely with developers on software build, test, and deployment automation is great. But if your job is maintaining production hardware, network, operating system, DNS, SSL certificates, firewalls, backups, etc., then you're a sysadmin. It's not a pejorative term. In a small organization, or within a team, that may be combined with a DevOps role. You may even have one person who maintains all your infrastructure for production and development, and even doubles as a developer. That still doesn't mean you label the entire role DevOps.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Depends on the Sysadmin :-) and the sort of Job I was hired as a dual Sysad/developer years ago as an explicit DevOps role (before devops was a thing) The team (telecoms billing systems) was also uncertain that the actual ops team could provide the required service.
user5994461 7y ago
A sysadmin is the person who setup the windows machines and the printers. If you're working with Linux systems and automating stuff, make yourself a favor and call yourself a DevOps.
- bsagdiyev 7y ago
  I automate and work with Linux systems and I still consider myself a sysadmin -- I'm not DevOps, I'm not an SRE. My skillset and experience might coincide with what those roles require, but I am and always will be a sysadmin in my mind. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't make it a supermodel.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

peteretep 7y ago

*shouldn’t

rospaya 7y ago

Oh, another person telling the world what devops means. If we take the 50 thousand or so other blog posts about the definition of devops and glue them together - it means whatever you want. Ops teams doing some code, devs building CI/CD infrastructure, whatever.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> another person telling the world what devops means....- it means whatever you want. I think that devops (like agile) will have a definite meaning, but uncovering that is mostly a process of examining the early history of it - who first used it and when? The definitions used, the problems that it aimed to solve, and the methods used to solve them. However, like "agile" it can and often is abused to mean everything and nothing. This does not make it inherently meaningless, though.

oweiler 7y ago

There is no DevOps role. There is no DevOps team. Devs doing Ops != DevOps. DevOps is about tearing down silos (Dev and Ops), not creating new ones.

levythe 7y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks like this. Every time I read someone referring to, "a DevOps," I wonder what they think they're referring to. No one person is going to be everything you need for effective development and operations combined outside of small, extremely focused scope. DevOps is about avoiding the, "Just throw it over the wall," mentality, not making one person handle the whole thing.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  >I wonder what they think they're referring to This and >DevOps is about avoiding the, "Just throw it over the wall," mentality, not making one person handle the whole thing. this are why it's now part of my interview process when I'm interviewing for a new role "how does your company/team define DevOps?" and I listen very closely for things that sound like 'over the wall-Ops'. Admittedly having the fortune at this point in life to be quite judicious about the answers given. Ostensibly, if I'm applying for a 'DevOps' role, I shouldn't have to do this if the job description is written well enough, yet even then this has become a learned behavior even when coming across the rare well-articulated job req.
empath75 7y ago
While I largely agree with that, I think it’s arguable that there are a set of technologies that enable that style of working, and that you can call an engineer that specializing in supporting those tools a devops engineer, and a team that supports them a devops team. Having devops teams and engineers isn’t the same as practicing devops, but once you scale up your org, you’re going to end up with them, anyway. For example, someone who is good with ci/cd pipelines, infra as code and just generally in automation and observability, as opposed to someone who is strong with linux internals or JavaScript You can tear down silos all you want, but everybody can’t know everything and people will always specialize.

ldoughty 7y ago

You also can't just rename your Dev team DevOps... Ops people come from a background favoring stability, security, and connecting components. Developers come from using new and great tools... Writing the connections between their own systems, and following API docs of their partners. Ops people usually have less CS training, and developers frequently don't understand security aspects of running systems or containers. You should merge the teams, not drop additional responsibility's on one side or the other that are outside their training/experience

techops 7y ago
Please be careful with the prejudices here around the CS knowledge of operations professionals. As a computer scientist who builds software for operations automation, I often find that developers work in interpreted or virtual execution environments and have little understanding of the underlying execution infrastructure or even the compiled environments that execute their code. The ops team understands throughput, I agree that cross-training and shared responsibility for both success and support are critical for success -- regardless of labels put on people and teams.

soneca 7y ago

Interesting, in my last company the team themselves thought DevOps was not a role, but more a responsibility that should be shared among all devs and they renamed themselves "Production Engineering". They said it was admittedly not the best, clearest of the names, but the important thing is that DevOps should be shared, not owned. As a dev, it made a lot of sense to me

phlakaton 7y ago
> They renamed themselves "Production Engineering" That jibes with my experience, where there has generally been one or more groups that build and maintain infrastructure to enable dev teams to build, deploy, monitor, etc. But what do you call it? It's not a DevOps role per se, nor really an Ops role, but it enables DevOps. We called it Platform, but said we were hiring DevOps engineers. In short: it's a mess. :-)
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  That role /team is real, especially in larger orgs, and a better name for it is "platform" / "platform team" / "platform engineering" not "DevOps". If you must call it "DevOps", it is "Devops enablement team", i.e. supplying a platform to enable dev teams to better Develop, build, deploy, monitor, Operate what they make, themselves - enabling others to do DevOps by supplying tools. See: https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/platform-engineering-product-teams https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/platform-engin... https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-platform-team-now-the-secrets-to-successful-engineering-8a9b6a4d2c8 https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-platform-team-now-the-...

rhoyerboat 7y ago

Agreed, but, perhaps, as a management strategy, it may help some teams transition. Since after all, for folks with careers in manual provisioning, devops truly is a new frame of mind.. swapping words in titles around is just part of operations development? :)

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Maybe people shouldn’t get stuck up that much about words. Unfortunately they are so it’s smart to attach yourself to the currently fashionable title. If you do something with dev tools call yourself “devops”. If you run a few database queries better call yourself “data scientist “. And if your current buzzword falls out of favor then don’t change your work but find a new fashionable label. It’s an unfortunate state of the industry that we put value and prestige into ill defined labels.

thrower123 7y ago

DevOps, like most IT fads, is just trying to get more blood out of the stone and avoid letting anyone specialize in anything. That's obviously not the original intent, but it's what happens.

cletus 7y ago

If you can rename "statistics" to "machine learning" and "data analyst" to "data scientist" [1], I don't see why you can't rename "IT Ops" to "Dev Ops". [1] If you haven't heard it, there's a joke: Q: What's the difference between a data analyst and a data scientist? A: The data scientist lives in San Francisco

CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
The distinguishing factor between those two roles that I have noticed is data scientists build predictive models and use statistics somehow, while analysts are relegated to the 'grunt' work like cleaning data, building reports, etc. Analysts are typically working to become data scientists. I only have 5 years of work experience at 2 companies, so I'm sure results vary. I make sure not to make any assumptions when I hear either title, however, I've met incompetent 'data scientists' and brilliant 'analysts'.

at_a_remove 7y ago

I had this happen to me from the other end. I was the lone programmer (and my title reflected that). After a new hire, I was told that I was some kind of engineer because my title had changed to that and that we are now DevOps, hooray! Not coincidentally, this was to be my final awful Agile experience. The thing is, I am not gifted in the area of system administration. I am not too shabby at it in Windows, quite pathetic in Linux, but being a sysadmin was a role I had escaped for a reason. And suddenly I am back in it. I am a very low-tooling programmer. Just let me stick my hands in the data and go away. I have great respect for people who are system administrators but it is a job where my talents lie below my meager skills, and my inclination far below that. Meanwhile, the true system administrators, who had been doing that for quite some time, had been denied the actual title for some time, were going to be moved over just as ... bodies, I guess, to elsewhere. All just ... DevOps now or whatever. What a trainwreck.

esotericn 7y ago

Role names in most software companies that I've worked at and know of are almost completely arbitrary. They're useful if you have an organization that pays a specific rate for a specific job title, and they're useful in a hierarchical sense (e.g. managers, CTOs, etc). That's about it. I install and maintain servers and desktops, databases, run backups, build infrastructure, source control servers, do low level programming, high level programming, frontend, backend, ... etc, it's too long to even enumerate. As far as I'm concerned that's just being a (non-junior) software developer. It's all ultimately the same thing with different names to me, barely anywhere really needs people who are at the forefront in a tiny niche (i.e. _real_ specialists). You can call me whatever you want as long as you're paying the bills.

systematical 7y ago

How is such a thin article upvoted? That was basically a verbose tweet.

elm_ 7y ago
It's funny - recently on HN I've seen posts that are a small twitter thread: "Why isn't this a blog post?!" Someone writes a short blog post, and... "That was basically a verbose tweet." ️
gtirloni 7y ago
Because some people find that it's a good topic to be discussed here. Or they want to +1 the idea. Or... Who knows. I've upvoted bad articles because the discussion they triggered was very interesting.
insomniacity 7y ago
Because really you're supposed to click the link in the article and listen to the interview.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  If TFA contained a transcript it might have been worth an upvote...
  - neonate 7y ago
    Looks like there's a transcript here: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SED771-Datree.pdf https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019...
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Now that could get an upvote!
    - l0b0 7y ago
      Can we replace the original link with either this or the audio?

jacobsenscott 7y ago

Wait, nobody ever named a team "IT Ops".

rubyfan 7y ago

At public corporations (especially regulated) there are confounding factors that make DevOps a farce. For example audit, a point of view that IT is a cost center, and the non technical management decision making that go along with the previous challenge the spirit and proper execution to get DevOps right. But in reality DevOps is a symptom of a larger issue - functional reporting structures and goal misalignment. Audit - the idea that your developer doesn’t have access to production systems and data is a challenge to DevOps. The idea that one person codes and one deploys can be a challenge. Some organizations like management visibility and an audit trail to prove it - this can challenge automation and frequent deployment. This is not just a DevOps issue, audit expectations for business requirements and QA signoff can be just as bad. Admittedly some of the audit rules are relics of the past but the need to be addressed in order for DevOps practices (and really for agile teams to be agile. In organizations where IT is a supporting function of the business there is a view point that it’s a cost center only and doesn’t produce value and should be cost controlled and managed to ultimate efficiency. I’ve reminded CIOs that the work the IT team does is not “a factory” as they sometimes insist on calling it - no one in technology that I’ve ever met (except management) really wants to think they work in a factory. The efficiency mindset rank orders roles with QA and analysts at the bottom, devops slightly higher, developers relatively high, architects at the top of the skilled food chain and management of course at the top. To some degree these functions can be centralized so they can be optimized and made efficient. Centralizing typically means you work for management rather than a particular business mission. Your job is to make management look good and keep everything running smoothly (remember you work in a factory). Management generally looks good when quality is achieved at a lower price point. Along with that tends to be a higher level of off shoring at the lower end of the skill rank where larger numbers means more efficiency at lower cost. Here lies the problem - the premise of DevOps is that the role is integrated in the team. When DevOps is a function reporting to management then their goals aren’t aligned to the development team. They might not even sit with the team and they might have their own orders. They might be in a 12-20 hour time zone offset. To me the larger issue is management structures aligned by function instead of business. This leads to misalignment if goals and ultimately lack of integration in functions. It’s a bigger problem than DevOps and it’s a bigger problem than IT. I think the companies that get management reporting right will win in the end. I am curious to see how Google and Amazon respond to these issues at their scale. The pizza team doesn’t work when everyone has different goals.

farisjarrah 7y ago

> You can't just rename your IT Ops team and call it DevOps Sure you can. Companies can and will do whatever they want. It may not be semantically correct, but it definitely wont stop anyone. Just go on indeed and look up "DevOps jobs" and you'll see many companies who have done just that.

jasoneckert 7y ago

The sad reality in most organizations today is that buzz words are applied to existing jobs to make it look like progress. So yes, apparently you can rename your IT Ops team to DevOps and brag about "how you engaged your teams to move to a DevOps focus to better align them with company values while leveraging the low-hanging fruit within today's shifting economy" during an executive management meeting.

supercommand 7y ago

Cloud engineer. Network engineer. Software engineer.... I’ve never heard of medstudents calling themselves doctors, why do cs students/grads get a pass? Up next chefs will be food engineers, tailors will be clothing engineers, and because I changed the oil in my Toyota once, I’m now a Toyota engineer; specializing in fluids. Words mean literally nothing anymore (ha). Titles in tech are hilarious at almost every level, especially from the outside looking in.

klodolph 7y ago
This argument gets rehashed in HN pretty often. When I just worked in ops or support my job title had the word “technician” in it. When I was designing systems my job title had the word “engineer” in it, even if I also had ops duties. As far as I can tell this is a regional thing, where certain jurisdictions have laws that regulate who can call themselves engineers, just like certain jurisdictions have laws about who can call themselves hairdressers. That doesn’t stop people on HN from thinking that for some reason, we can all agree on a definition for “engineer”, even though we have regular disagreements about the definition about almost every other word in the English language. “DevOps” is at least ill-defined from the very start, so if we have arguments about what “DevOps” means, at least I can learn something.
jldugger 7y ago
Well, at a certain level it applies. Part of doing my job well involves designing service quality checks. That requires: 1. understanding important engineering principals like queuing theory 2. understanding the system in question well enough to modify it to emit relevant metrics for applying stuff like queuing theory 3. collecting this data into timeseries form 4. applying statistical tests to them, e.g. for normality. 5. deciding between a variety of possible anomaly detection algorithms Another portion involves capacity planning and datacenter design, which requires a certain amount of electrical engineering knowledge, as well as forecasting. A different part of my job simply involves writing software, testing it, and signing off on changes. Overall it sounds fairly engineery, even if the powers that be would rather prefer it if the term be reserved those who pass an internship and test (but then refuse to expand said test to include new domains).
7y ago

kazinator 7y ago

DevOps means "the build and continuous integration system is so complicated, it needs dedicated people who have software dev credentials".

mindcrime 7y ago

Yep. Similar notion applies with "Agile" -- you can't just throw out all requirements analysis, up-front design, and architecture work, and say "We're Agile". But people do it all the time, because they're enthralled with the buzzword and not the actual meaning behind the buzzword. Same applies for ( Agile | Devops | $WHATEVER). And the sad thing is, this in turn devalues the original idea and causes a backlash where people throw the baby out because somebody crapped in the bathwater.

DataWorker 7y ago
It’s how tech and capitalism interface. The $whatever is actively marketed, the profits are arbitrage between the true value of the thing and the perception of the value. Since that value perception is easy to manipulate with network effects, and true innovation much more difficult, we then become stagnant. Maybe this is why we don’t see much productivity for the past several decades. Productivity gains are never realized because the tech stays constant while perceptions are maneuvered for profit. One reason China may win; less respect for IP.

iio7 7y ago

I'm so sick of all this hyped up bullshit! Someone who administers systems is a system administrator and someone who develops is a programmer. And in my 30+ years in the business I haven't seen a single BSD or Linux system administrator who couldn't also program in C or some other language.

purplezooey 7y ago

"...not about hiring a 'DevOps guy'" Yet, this is one of the most common scenarios I've seen. "Oh, this guy/gal started devops at Xyz company.".