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If that's what "devops" was before, we needed to kill the term earlier than you might think. Devops was originally a set of software release practises and cultu

by kqr 4y ago

If that's what "devops" was before, we needed to kill the term earlier than you might think. Devops was originally a set of software release practises and culture that result in higher quality software, including high release cadence, blame-free postmortems, small patches, time for experimentation, automated testing, continuous integration, etc. These practises normally require close collaboration between dev and infra, but are separate from it because you can have close collaboration on big, quarterly releases based on manually verified long-lived feature branches -- yet that is not devops.

zeckalpha 4y ago
The title/subtitle of the talk mentions both of these definitions: https://youtu.be/LdOe18KhtT4 https://youtu.be/LdOe18KhtT4
chatmasta 4y ago
I get where the author is coming from. The meaning of "DevOps" is in the name - it stems from a culture of encouraging _devs_ to do _ops_, and rejecting the antiquated separation between developers who write the code and the sys-admins who deploy the code. The term "DevOps" doesn't need retiring, but "DevOps Engineer" does. DevOps is a culture and a practice that allows developers to iterate quickly by taking ownership of the operations of the software they build. Every engineer is a DevOps engineer. But such a widespread diffusion of responsibilities doesn't mean the specialists suddenly disappear. It's not like every dev knows how to configure a new multi-region cluster with automated failover. Instead, they know how to use whatever platform they've been empowered with to help them manage such operations. For this reason, I think "Platform Engineer" is a better word than "DevOps Engineer" for describing the differentiated specialization of this role. Every developer in an organization engages in "DevOps" on a regular basis, whenever they debug a CI pipeline or deploy a new service. But someone needs to build, setup and maintain all the tooling to enable those _devs_ to do _ops_. In my mind, that's the specialized role of a Platform Engineer.
- kqr 4y ago
  But DevOps does not mean "devs" doing "ops"! I feel like I'm repeating myself now, but devops is a culture promoting lean-inspired practises to reduce batch size and increase cadence. Go back to the original clique of people who started talking about devops and that was what they were discussing. I can absolutely see how the name "devops" is confusing and easily lead to the sort of misunderstanding your comment propagates. I don't know why they picked that name. Maybe it was about applying concepts from operations research and business operations into development -- who knows. Either way, the way I read your comment, it is more proof that the name is misleading and should be retired.

by kqr 4y ago

zeckalpha 4y ago

The title/subtitle of the talk mentions both of these definitions: https://youtu.be/LdOe18KhtT4 https://youtu.be/LdOe18KhtT4

chatmasta 4y ago

I get where the author is coming from. The meaning of "DevOps" is in the name - it stems from a culture of encouraging _devs_ to do _ops_, and rejecting the antiquated separation between developers who write the code and the sys-admins who deploy the code. The term "DevOps" doesn't need retiring, but "DevOps Engineer" does. DevOps is a culture and a practice that allows developers to iterate quickly by taking ownership of the operations of the software they build. Every engineer is a DevOps engineer. But such a widespread diffusion of responsibilities doesn't mean the specialists suddenly disappear. It's not like every dev knows how to configure a new multi-region cluster with automated failover. Instead, they know how to use whatever platform they've been empowered with to help them manage such operations. For this reason, I think "Platform Engineer" is a better word than "DevOps Engineer" for describing the differentiated specialization of this role. Every developer in an organization engages in "DevOps" on a regular basis, whenever they debug a CI pipeline or deploy a new service. But someone needs to build, setup and maintain all the tooling to enable those _devs_ to do _ops_. In my mind, that's the specialized role of a Platform Engineer.

kqr 4y ago
But DevOps does not mean "devs" doing "ops"! I feel like I'm repeating myself now, but devops is a culture promoting lean-inspired practises to reduce batch size and increase cadence. Go back to the original clique of people who started talking about devops and that was what they were discussing. I can absolutely see how the name "devops" is confusing and easily lead to the sort of misunderstanding your comment propagates. I don't know why they picked that name. Maybe it was about applying concepts from operations research and business operations into development -- who knows. Either way, the way I read your comment, it is more proof that the name is misleading and should be retired.