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An open source effort to define GitOps may save it from becoming just a buzzword
- mikethemelanson 4y agoOne of my personal favorite parts of the article: While confusion around what constitutes GitOps versus some other approach led to the current effort to define the term, John Allspaw, who is among those credited with popularizing the word “DevOps,” argues that a definition is only valuable if it enables productive conversation. “How many debates are found in social media about what observability, DevOps, or Agile means? If one of the contenders wins, so what?” says Allspaw. “Is that definition open to interpretation? The answer will be yes, because that's how words work, and therefore, what you thought you were doing by solving a clear and agreed upon definition didn't do the thing that you thought it did.” For Allspaw, discussing the topic at hand is more important than having a solidified definition. In fact, he argues that having a definition of DevOps early on would have caused more harm than good, because people would have either opted in or out of conversations about DevOps depending on what that definition entailed. “People say ‘DevOps this, DevOps that,’ but I just ask them to describe what they do. It’s either DevOps or it’s not. They’ll have reasons for why it's DevOps in this way, or it’s not DevOps in that way, but it doesn’t matter. The point wasn’t to coin a term. You need words to refer to things, but I’m more interested in descriptions,” says Allspaw. “One of the best ways to keep from getting sucked into a misunderstanding due to an overburdened phrase is to just talk about the thing that it’s supposed to represent. If you want to say ‘deploying new code’ then say ‘deploying new code.’”