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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 whe

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.
- wink 5y ago
  I'd go a bit further and say they usually accomplished the same thing with shoddier tools, but for a less spiky usage/volume pattern. And less reproducible, but even that only partially. The only real difference I see is that nowadays they're writing more "software" and less "scripts", fwiw. But the amount of pessimistic thinking about what will break next is the same :)
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Nobody is arguing that DevOps and SRE are brand new. But saying "sysadmins were doing then what SRE does today" is a bit like saying "builders in the 1500s were doing what builders today do". Yeah, they're building houses, and trying to make sure they don't fall on somebody's head. But the practices are quite a bit more developed now, and the old-school people don't know what the new-school people are doing. So it's still worth learning and separating from what came before, because the advantages of the new practices outweigh those of the old.

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.

wink 5y ago
I'd go a bit further and say they usually accomplished the same thing with shoddier tools, but for a less spiky usage/volume pattern. And less reproducible, but even that only partially. The only real difference I see is that nowadays they're writing more "software" and less "scripts", fwiw. But the amount of pessimistic thinking about what will break next is the same :)
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Nobody is arguing that DevOps and SRE are brand new. But saying "sysadmins were doing then what SRE does today" is a bit like saying "builders in the 1500s were doing what builders today do". Yeah, they're building houses, and trying to make sure they don't fall on somebody's head. But the practices are quite a bit more developed now, and the old-school people don't know what the new-school people are doing. So it's still worth learning and separating from what came before, because the advantages of the new practices outweigh those of the old.