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Doesn't DevOps/SRE apply mostly to folks that work for FAANGs or other tech companies and keep the infrastructure going? In my experience, plain old businesses

Doesn't DevOps/SRE apply mostly to folks that work for FAANGs or other tech companies and keep the infrastructure going? In my experience, plain old businesses still employ network admins/sysadmins like me. My sysadmin experience is in healthcare and higher-ed.

alchemism 5y ago
There are currently two flavors of SRE in the marketplace: one role supports public-facing internet applications; the other is as the parent describes, the ‘modern’ sysadmin who will understand how to do more than click boxes in a GUI.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iso1631 5y ago
If you can't scale to a billion people overnight, you don't have a real business /s
auspex 5y ago
It’s mostly used in cloud environments in my experience. Where you’re codifying everything (infra, security etc.) into a CI/CD pipeline and automating everything. In healthcare they are a lot slower to fully embrace cloud and CI/CD. So you have a lot on prem data center or hybrid cloud where you’re less likely to see teams fully embracing DevOps. I’d start reading up on this stuff as healthcare is (slowly) migrating.
- dijit 5y ago
  SRE doesn't imply cloud. I'm quite certain the originators of the term would be very upset with that idea. Cloud is a way of outsourcing some types of operations _to other companies SRE's_.
  - auspex 5y ago
    I was referring mostly to DevOPs practices mostly being found in cloud. You’re correct that SRE applies everywhere.
  - Art9681 5y ago
    Cloud has nothing to do with outsourcing. We run an OpenStack on-prem cloud all in house. Plenty of major businesses to do. Cloud is a software abstraction to maximize the efficiency of your data center.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
You'll find DevOps engineers (which isn't a thing[1], but unfortunately, is a thing[2]) wherever there's a tech product being developed, and SRE you'll find wherever a company has figured out that they need a real discipline to organize keeping their website/product/service reliably up. "Plain old" businesses could benefit greatly from DevOps. Even health care and higher-ed. The problem is, "regular people" see "IT people" as this mysterious cabal, and the people "in IT" often remain at exactly the same skill level and keep the same practices out of habit. But even a "regular old" IT department can up-skill with DevOps and SRE practices. There's a lot of practical advice buried within those two buzzwords. I still consider myself a Sysadmin, but I learned later how to "do DevOps", Site Reliability Engineering, and Systems Engineering. Even if you only work on small projects, it can really level up your career, and how your brain works in general. DevOps in particular is a deep rabbit hole that covers a couple dozen non-technical topics. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=there's+no+such+thing+as+a+devops+engineer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=there's+no+such+thing+as+a+devops+... [2] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops%20engineer https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops%20engineer
- doubled112 5y ago
  I think many forget that at the end of the day, you're still just administering systems and hopefully doing the least amount of manual work as practical. If you had two on prem servers, you'd be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business. If you had K8s clusters running 1000s of containers across the planet, you'd still be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business. I'm greatly simplifying of course, but slapping some buzzwords on didn't make it a brand new discipline.
- dijit 5y ago
  I've been doing sysadmin for 14 years at this point. Sysadmins of yore already did the things that SRE's and "DevOps Engineers" do; except they had less computing power to care for. I think it's an incredibly large strawman that everything "devops" and "SRE" espouses was never thought of before, it's just as disciplines mature things get easier and thus you can target better things. Monitoring used to be extremely hard: now it's less hard. Reproducible compute used to be extremely hard: now it's actually quite easy. Configuration management used to be quite hard: but now it's easy and accessible to many. But equally: Developing distributed systems used to be a lot harder than it is today, but the difference is we don't marr the word "Developer" by making it out to be something that goes against building distributed systems or linting their code. The role evolved with the times, but people were happy to retire the name sysadmin. Even though Sysadmins were doing the same things as SRE's today, just with more primitive tools, and thus: were less effective.
op00to 5y ago
My experience is most big corporations are trying their hardest to get away from traditional enterprise architecture and into a hybrid/multi cloud architecture. The sysadmins at these corporations are either reskilling to add the Dev side of devops, or they are leaving and going to smaller shops not yet ready the transition.

alchemism 5y ago

There are currently two flavors of SRE in the marketplace: one role supports public-facing internet applications; the other is as the parent describes, the ‘modern’ sysadmin who will understand how to do more than click boxes in a GUI.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

iso1631 5y ago

If you can't scale to a billion people overnight, you don't have a real business /s

auspex 5y ago

It’s mostly used in cloud environments in my experience. Where you’re codifying everything (infra, security etc.) into a CI/CD pipeline and automating everything. In healthcare they are a lot slower to fully embrace cloud and CI/CD. So you have a lot on prem data center or hybrid cloud where you’re less likely to see teams fully embracing DevOps. I’d start reading up on this stuff as healthcare is (slowly) migrating.

dijit 5y ago
SRE doesn't imply cloud. I'm quite certain the originators of the term would be very upset with that idea. Cloud is a way of outsourcing some types of operations _to other companies SRE's_.
- auspex 5y ago
  I was referring mostly to DevOPs practices mostly being found in cloud. You’re correct that SRE applies everywhere.
- Art9681 5y ago
  Cloud has nothing to do with outsourcing. We run an OpenStack on-prem cloud all in house. Plenty of major businesses to do. Cloud is a software abstraction to maximize the efficiency of your data center.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

You'll find DevOps engineers (which isn't a thing[1], but unfortunately, is a thing[2]) wherever there's a tech product being developed, and SRE you'll find wherever a company has figured out that they need a real discipline to organize keeping their website/product/service reliably up. "Plain old" businesses could benefit greatly from DevOps. Even health care and higher-ed. The problem is, "regular people" see "IT people" as this mysterious cabal, and the people "in IT" often remain at exactly the same skill level and keep the same practices out of habit. But even a "regular old" IT department can up-skill with DevOps and SRE practices. There's a lot of practical advice buried within those two buzzwords. I still consider myself a Sysadmin, but I learned later how to "do DevOps", Site Reliability Engineering, and Systems Engineering. Even if you only work on small projects, it can really level up your career, and how your brain works in general. DevOps in particular is a deep rabbit hole that covers a couple dozen non-technical topics. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=there's+no+such+thing+as+a+devops+engineer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=there's+no+such+thing+as+a+devops+... [2] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops%20engineer https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops%20engineer

doubled112 5y ago
I think many forget that at the end of the day, you're still just administering systems and hopefully doing the least amount of manual work as practical. If you had two on prem servers, you'd be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business. If you had K8s clusters running 1000s of containers across the planet, you'd still be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business. I'm greatly simplifying of course, but slapping some buzzwords on didn't make it a brand new discipline.
dijit 5y ago
I've been doing sysadmin for 14 years at this point. Sysadmins of yore already did the things that SRE's and "DevOps Engineers" do; except they had less computing power to care for. I think it's an incredibly large strawman that everything "devops" and "SRE" espouses was never thought of before, it's just as disciplines mature things get easier and thus you can target better things. Monitoring used to be extremely hard: now it's less hard. Reproducible compute used to be extremely hard: now it's actually quite easy. Configuration management used to be quite hard: but now it's easy and accessible to many. But equally: Developing distributed systems used to be a lot harder than it is today, but the difference is we don't marr the word "Developer" by making it out to be something that goes against building distributed systems or linting their code. The role evolved with the times, but people were happy to retire the name sysadmin. Even though Sysadmins were doing the same things as SRE's today, just with more primitive tools, and thus: were less effective.

op00to 5y ago

My experience is most big corporations are trying their hardest to get away from traditional enterprise architecture and into a hybrid/multi cloud architecture. The sysadmins at these corporations are either reskilling to add the Dev side of devops, or they are leaving and going to smaller shops not yet ready the transition.