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how is that any different than the traditional definition of "systems administrator" I've always felt DevOps was just a shiny new synonym for the decades old S

• Delmania 11y ago
  The difference is the Sys Admin don't know (or care) about the binaries produced by development. They simple configure a host, deploy it, and if they run into an issue, shoot it over to development to fix. In DevOps, sys admins are, at some point, actively working with the development team during development to understand the logic, and members of the development team are actively working with the ops teams to understand how the code is deployed. The goal is that sys admins can understand production errors, and developers get a sense for how their code is deployed.
• jbergens 11y ago
  As I understand DevOps are often meant to have more developer skills than sysadmins. They might have to help with how some infrastructure things in the applications should work and should be able to script the applications themselves, not just the OS. That said I just think it is a role inside the system administrators group that is expected to know some extra things and have much more discussions with the developers (or a person inside the development group that knows more about sysadmin and has the right to do more things with the servers).
• falcolas 11y ago
  I like the sibling comments, here's my own take on that question. I spend my time proactively solving operational problems, while you typical sysadmin acts much more reactively. I've found that there was always that one sysadmin who was thinking in the longer term and who spent their time working on proactive solutions to problems which weren't burning the house down (yet), the new name just codifies that type of role.
• bradleyland 11y ago
  As the old saying goes, there's nothing new under the sun. DevOps is very closely related to sysadmin work. I think it would be fair to say that DevOps is just a specialized form of sysadmin work. You could even say that it is just an approach to sysadmin work. DevOps means using orchestration and automation tools to perform sysadmin tasks, rather than doing everything by hand. It's a layer atop the tools that sysadmins are used to using. The "dev" part of the term relates to the "infrastructure as code" concept. This concept dictates that your infrastructure should be defined as code that outputs your infrastructure. Depending on how far along you are in your sysadmin career, and depending on the size of the organization you work in, this may be nothing new, but more recent DevOps efforts extend this to organizations of much smaller size. For example, it is not unusual for environments requiring only a handful of servers (or even one!) to use a fully automated provisioning and deployment toolchain. Ultimately, you can make the argument that this is nothing new. You can do that with just about anything. "DevOps" is not a provable assertion; it is a refinement of the language used to describe the jobs we do.
• sre_ops 11y ago
  SysAdmin : "you cannot do that because" DevOps: "we make it work even though others can't"