Opinion: DevOps Is Dead (techcrunch.com) 123
Andrey Akselrod, CTO and a co-founder of Smartling, writes for TechCrunch: DevOps, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me, but the age of DevOps is just about over. It's a "Perfect Storm" scenario in some ways. Lots of events coming together that drastically change the status quo. And where it all began was the concept and eventual widespread adoption of agile development and continuous deployment practices. DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground. The premise was to automate the development and deployment tools that require collaborations between both disciplines. But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set. Thus, most companies resolved to create DevOps teams that combined the expertise of both sides to support their developers. The old model of throwing the code over the wall to system administrators who would deploy it stopped working with agile processes and continuous deployment practices. Whose responsibility is it when something goes wrong -- the person deploying the code or the developer? Developers don't know much about deploying and systems administrators don't know much about how the code is supposed to work.
Re:Slashdot is now... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slashdot is now... (Score:5, Interesting)
As an operations person by trade, and a developer sometimes by necessity, there is a lot of truth to the idea that a DevOps person is merely someone who used to be called "that System Administrator who codes stuff for us" or a "that poor Developer who has been stuck with the sysadmin tasks and setting up Jenkins"
While buzzwordy, that sort of work might be something that is worth having a name of its own. So I think something that happens to go by the buzzwordy title of "DevOps" is real, but not quite in the way it was being pushed.
I used to joke that DevOps was merely the massive campaign launched by developers who were tired of trying to get Operations to give them root access in Production so they could change things without having to actually fill out a change control and explain to someone who wasn't a developer how to do it. And some of the ideas behind it still sort of smell like that, but that really never became real practice outside of a few types of applications that really lent itself to that sort of pacing.
Instead, I think it has sort of matured into a sort of tools mindset where we are able to use more software defined infrastructure and certain tools to actually break out of the mold of the sysadmin who was first and foremost that guy who was responsible for going to the datacenter and installing Linux or a hypervisor aside from any other tasks. We still need those people, but I think it this is a milepost in the differentiation of admins.
I don't hire "DevOps" people, and while that is the name of a cross-team group where I work, we're still Operations and Development and under different management. And strictly speaking, I always believed that this was how it was supposed to work. If there was anything where DevOps really provided value, it was in the very simple proposition that Ops and Dev should talk to one another and work less like two walled fortresses that occasionally sent heralds between them with formal communications. There is also value in your Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Docker as well, although that could have happened without "DevOps".
But more importantly, as a reference "description", if I tell a recruiter what I need and I was to say a DevOps person, they usually get me exactly who I want. I don't think that usage is dead or dying.
So no, I don't think DevOps is meaningless. It just isn't the "movement" that it started off as and it matured into something slightly different. Perhaps we'll call that something else more descriptive someday and the term can be relegated to the trash heap of history. Until the next buzzword.
Re: Slashdot is now... (Score:2)
I've been converted into a developer only I still spend my time doing operations and challenging developers to work securely. I rescue them regularly and explain their errata with your code is bad, your toolbelt is weak or this kernel bug hates you.
You're right about everything but it can be a miserably rewarding existence as if something like that is possible.
DevOps is dead and people like me dragged it out into the street and shot it. Here's a firewalled sandbox go nuts devs. To quote Martha: It's a go
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The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Re:Opinion: Slashdot is dead (Score:5, Funny)
Respectfully, I've been reading about the death of the site for years. It may well be dying, but I don't think Netcraft has yet confirmed it.
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It's rapidly becoming, if not there already, cleverly disguised click bait of the lowest scientific or tech quality.
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Isn't it just a money saving idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
"DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground."
I thought the idea was to make developers do system administration and save money. Did I miss something?
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Yes because our company had DevOps and Sys Admins doing very different things.. DevOps has just been dissolved here, and this thing of tribes and guilds has been implemented, where a tribe can have people for any number of different areas working together on a common set of goals or targets.
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Yes because our company had DevOps and Sys Admins doing very different things.. DevOps has just been dissolved here, and this thing of tribes and guilds has been implemented, where a tribe can have people for any number of different areas working together on a common set of goals or targets.
Our company has made us all serfs.
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Yes because our company had DevOps and Sys Admins doing very different things.. DevOps has just been dissolved here, and this thing of tribes and guilds has been implemented, where a tribe can have people for any number of different areas working together on a common set of goals or targets.
Why did the giant pillow fight from Community just come to mind...
http://putlocker.is/watch-community-tvshow-season-3-episode-14-online-free-putlocker.html [putlocker.is]
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It sounds like your company just hired a new executive with "ideas" and now you have to deal with that bullshit. I'm so very sorry.
DevOps, for all it's fabulous buzzword glory, actually sounds a little bit more sane than that. Especially, if your company managed to redefine it into something workable before it was deleted.
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"Developers who can't ship their code, usually can't write good code either, and don't understand the bigger picture of systems they're creating"
That's most of the developers I've seen. Good QA can save them from themselves.
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"Developers who can't ship their code, usually can't write good code either, and don't understand the bigger picture of systems they're creating"
That's most of the developers I've seen. Good QA can save them from themselves.
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only with more people on the payroll.
And better Up-time.
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I'd say that falls under the aegis of a developer. There is a difference between someone hammering out code in the programming language of the hour, as opposed to someone who can take their code in their git repo, package it (MSI for Windows, .rpm, .deb, and .tar.gz for Linux, .dmg for OS X, installp for AIX, etc.), build it, make a testable release to hand to alpha or beta testers [1], then after that gets hammered out, yank the debug code, then build a release that can install and uninstall without issue
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Re:Isn't it just a money saving idea? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the idea was to make developers do system administration and save money. Did I miss something?
Nope - you got it. And since devs make more than admins, the whole thing is fucking stupid any way you look at it.
We do devops in my shop. We're devs being forced to do sysadmin work for the production stack. We're professionals and we try our best, but it's a train wreck. We're great at automating our mistakes, but we're constantly doing to sort of shit that seems right to a junior sysadmin, but a veteran sysadmin shout down as idiotic. Too bad we don't have any of those.
It's the kind of deeply stupid idea that could only make sense to an MBA.
Re: Isn't it just a money saving idea? (Score:1)
Bitter much? I'm also like you, a bit of everything. More positions are open to me (and presumably you) than the average narrowly-focused techie. That glass is half full dude.
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"Bitter much? I'm also like you, a bit of everything. More positions are open to me (and presumably you) than the average narrowly-focused techie."
Truly. But since any open position is a the-winner-takes-all game you can offer yourself for a lot of positions... always to find it went to somebody who was a better fit.
Compound that with an HR system that absolutely lacks the knowledge to see a jack-of-all-trades even if that's the resume title and you'll in real troubles.
PS: DevOps is a new title for what us
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"PS: DevOps is a new title for what used to be a senior sysadmin worth his salt -it's only neither the youngsters nor the HR dpt. know it.
Not really. Infrastructure as code or automating deployments, is not the ultimate goal. If a senior sysadmin sits away from the devs, there's always a lack of alignment."
Not necessarily: the sysadmin knows his way through code, since that was needed it to even compile it, and the developer knows his way into systems, since that's needed to program something with chances t
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I've never really understood this admin/developer dichotomy. If you're a developer, don't you need to know how to do admin tasks like install operating systems, manage user accounts, compile software from source and build packages? If you're an admin, don't you need to know how to program so you can build the tools you need, or understand concepts like IPC? How do you troubleshoot misbehaving processes if you don't know how to use a debugger or follow system traces? Granted, you may not be the best at a
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I've never really understood this admin/developer dichotomy. If you're a developer, don't you need to know how to do admin tasks like install operating systems, manage user accounts, compile software from source and build packages?
Even in devops, I never install an OS or manage a user account - we're too large scale and each of those things is a well-staffed specialty. We do software deployments to quite a large number of machines. If we do it wrong, and take the whole fleet down due to a bug, it costs us hundreds of dollars per minute (so we're sort of medium-scale). There's a whole career around managing deployments and patching responsibly, ensuring you don't break anything, and if anything breaks on it's own, you're paged with
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I think it's a really bad idea to let developers act as the admins in any environment with production systems in it. Developers tens to be really keen to get the admin stuff done quickly and get back to the exciting development work so they take short cuts which can lead to disaster.
Re: Isn't it just a money saving idea? (Score:1)
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One of the elements of DevOps is to combine the skillets of developers and sysadmins to shorten the deployment timeframe. In places where it works, it works well. Of course, this wouldn't be required if we raised the expectations and pay of sysadmins (like a flat 15-20k bump, or more, afer passing some type of sufficiently hard qualifying exam)
I'm not particularly a certificate hound, but I think the RHCSA and RHCE are good things for exactly this reason.
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"The problem is that since windows came around, it's not uncommon for your average sysadmin to have no idea how to meaningfully scipt"
That was a very clever push from Microsoft's marketing: call mere operators sysadmins. Once you had the pay scale of sysadmins down to those of operators, make the claim of how cheap using Windows was, compared to Linux/commercial UNIX. Once that there basically were no sysadmins anymore (who would do it for almost help-desk wages?) no one would even tell the difference.
Now
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I switched from Windows to Linux as a system admin, and while there are some excellent Windows admins, there are alot more who would probably be better classified as operators. They only follow very specific instructions.
I find that the wheat to chaff ration on the Linux side is much better, but there are still alot of System Admins who don't know anything about networking. In today's world, IMHO, that's as important as writing and reading scripts.
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Makes sense. Most DevOps people would be better employed as fry-cooks.
This just in (Score:1)
Unicode on Slashdot is dead!
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Netcraft confirms it.
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In other words, Ops manage the infrastructure and tools, and devs manage their applications on the infrastructure using the tools ops gave them. This becomes important as the number
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> I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death,
If I were you, I'd wait to see what replaces DevOps You may well end up looking back on the good old days of DevOps.
Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare. I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme.
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"Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare."
It is not, in fact. It all boils down to just taking a tight team of people, with the proper push, seniority and complementary abilities to cover top to bottom a service's needs and let them do their stuff.
Doesn't sound such a new concept, does it?
"I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme."
Probably you are right since any organization that t
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> I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death,
If I were you, I'd wait to see what replaces DevOps You may well end up looking back on the good old days of DevOps.
Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare. I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme.
If you have no experience with the DevOps concept and it's something that sounds bizarre to you, you probably just never worked in a small organization. If the organization is small enough, the sysadmin and the developer are the same person. As an organization grows and additional staff are hired, you will see more specialization but it's still not unusual for a dev to retain the ability to deploy to production in smaller shops. Even if that's not the case, in a smaller shop the devs and the operations peop
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Docker isn't that bad. Although we did have some operations people who understand how it works, so we know that you have to scan the original host that the containers were made on for vulnerabilities and make sure it is patched and all of that before you deploy a new one. And that you have to rebuild and redeploy it when patches and vulnerabilities are released.
Yeah, there was a lot of "developers love Docker", but as an ops person, I think it can help with some of the real issues we have around scaling a
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"Docker isn't that bad."
Docker isn't that bad in the same sense PHP isn't that bad: while it may be judiciously used in some scenarios, it's ability to be misused probably makes it safer to just outright ban it.
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Heh, you should read the new proposed security assessment guidelines for the FedRAMP Accelerated program for government Cloud purchases.
They basically suggest that containerized applications are a higher level of security than VMs. If you understand the sort of reasoning they're using it sort of makes sense, due to smaller attack surfaces and all of that, but I still found it amusing.
Unfortunately, that hilarity will likely become the standard for government Cloud security soon. So, biting my tongue, inst
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While the idea may have originally been to encourage tighter collaboration between developers and system administrators in "agile" environments, that's not how most "DevOps" environments work. In most cases, DevOps ends up being implemented as a way to save money by combining development and operations positions into a single hire.
I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death, just so HR people will stop trying to use it as an excuse to merge two complementary but non-interchangeable positions into a single hire.
Where are my freaking mod points when I need them ?
Thinking, as we know it, is dead! (Score:2)
Insert BOLD claim here to get attention because I'm lonely.
DevOps, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me
Should have stopped right there.. because the next sentence fragment should be "because I'm a raving lunatic who doesn't understand the words coming out of my mouth"
TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying (Score:5, Funny)
It is now official. TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered DevOps community when TechCrunch confirmed that DevOps market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all positions. Coming on the heels of a recent TechCrunch survey which plainly states that DevOps has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. DevOps is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive job openings test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict DevOps's future. The hand writing is on the wall: DevOps faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for DevOps because DevOps is dying. Things are looking very bad for DevOps. As many of us are already aware, DevOps continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
AgileDevOps is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developer/administrators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AgileDevOps developers Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AgileDevOps is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenDevOps leader Lennart Poettering states that there are 7000 users of OpenDevOps. How many users of SystemDevOps are there? Let's see. The number of OpenDevOps versus SystemDevOps posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SystemDevOps users. DevOps/OS posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of SystemDevOps posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of DevOps/OS. A recent article put AgileDevOps at about 80 percent of the DevOps market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 AgileDevOps users. This is consistent with the number of AgileDevOps Slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of Caldera, abysmal sales and so on, AgileDevOps went out of business and was taken over by SCODevOps who sell another troubled OS. Now SCODevOps is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that DevOps has steadily declined in market share. DevOps is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If DevOps is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. DevOps continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, DevOps is dead.
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You know how I know it is dead?
IBM implemented it a year ago.
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Does this make me an IT Hipster God? (Score:3)
I was doing DevOps before it was cool, and now I'm doing it after it's obsolete. Warby Parkers and luxuriant 1800s facial hair should spontaneously appear on my face any second now.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Dead? Was it ever alive? (Score:3)
"Developers don't know much about deploying and systems administrators don't know much about how the code is supposed to work."
That's the problem. DevOps was never a solution, but more the term used by companies that were searching for a solution. Lots of studies done, probably lots of consultants got paid - but an actual solution that was better than what people had been doing for years anyway? Never seen one yet...
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So.... like every other big technology buzzword since the history of the industry?
It's really a tiresome industry in that respect. Lot's of real stuff happening, but far more weird marketing bullshit for utterly inane stuff.
It'd be like if a new socket wrench came out and made headlines for it's new approach to manipulating bolts. People would rightfully wonder why the hell a bunch of articles are being written about something so banal. In IT, somehow it's exciting...
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Never heard this buzzword before. Therefore, combined with the mention of agile here and there, I conclude that it must be something to do with web server backends?
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Devs t
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DevOps is a term you enter into a search engine to find jobs in that area.
DevOps is a keyword you add to your job description if you want to hire an build engineer or admin for QA or Test systems, probably someone pushing CI and CD or doing second and third level support of a platform.
Jobs like that always existed and will always exist.
DevOps is just a new keyword/name. Not a new concept and not an obsolet concept.
On my business card is written: software generalist
I do everything form requirements engineeri
To paraphrase Zappa (Score:3)
DevOps isn't dead. It just smells funny.
But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set.
This is what is killing it. Not the idea that developers have to write deployable, maintainable stuff. Ops needs to plug it in correctly. So lets create a software lifecycle that sits both parties down at the table while the requirements paper is still blank. That's a good idea. What makes it smell like a rotten corpse is the idea that a nice, shiny toolset must be procured to do the job. And consultants tacked big price tags onto their products and shoved them down the CIO's throat.
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What you describe sounds reasonable. I don't think I've heard anyone proclaim DevOps to be that rather than starting to apply particularly hyped tools to a process indiscriminately. I suppose unsurprisingly a recommendation about something like modifying your philosophy about planning would not get any attention, since there's no profit to be had in that sort of interpretation.
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in theory, what you say is correct.
in practice, devops is about saving money by firing the sysadmins and making one or more of the devs do the sysadmins' job.
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making one or more of the devs do the sysadmins' job
Or it might mean hiring sysadmins who have some crossover talent into the dev camp. So they can work well with the development team. And then the sysadmins who get fired are the ones who don't want to help out in the development phase.
In any organization there are a certain number of man hours of work to be done. Both on the admin as well as the dev side. Take a developer and expect him to do admin work and that's some development work that won't be getting done.
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Now, now. Sometimes the CTOs or CIOs used the term to make themselves sound impressive and relevant. Let's not put it all on the consultants.
OpsEng, not DevOps (Score:5, Interesting)
And where it all began was the concept and eventual widespread adoption of agile development and continuous deployment practices.
There's a difference between recognizing the limits of testing and ensuring you can rapidly respond if something doesn't go as expected and reverting is likely to be less successful than fixing forward.... and being unable to plan because you have no idea what you're doing and don't understand system troubleshooting.
But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set.
Yes, this group is called OpsEng.
The old model of throwing the code over the wall to system administrators who would deploy it stopped working with agile processes and continuous deployment practices.
If you're throwing over the wall, you're doing it wrong. You should be throwing it above or below you in the stack, with each group having a clear demarcation point and expected SLAs to other groups internally, so planning, risk assessment, and performance expectations can be performed appropriately.
Replacing one broken culture with another one doesn't fix anything; and DevOps nowadays usually results in developers trying to code their way around their lack of systems skills more than systems engineers getting to be able to communicate back to devs.
Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always a good day when a buzzword dies before I ever get the chance to learn what it means.
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Too true. Although now I have to go back and laugh at the people that have been using this buzzword. Some of them are such posers.
Re: Excellent news (Score:1)
These buzzwords, some years ago "SOA" and "EBS", and more recently " devops", are press invented jargon to try keep historically paper-based IT weeklies and more recently their web-based equivalents (infoq, the serverside, ... etc) and their advertisers afloat. More recently it's "microservices". Keep an eye out for that one now "devops" is "dead".
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It's always a good day when a buzzword dies before I ever get the chance to learn what it means.
"Truer words were never spoken!"
But Buzzwords are like mosquitoes, there is always another one... 8-)
Dead? (Score:3)
Not dead, just lying comatose until the next generation of MBAs "invents" it again.
Pay cut. (Score:1)
Runtime Technologies (Score:2)
I checked into the author's venture, Runtime Technologies, and this is one of the blurbs I found;
One suspects their staff writers are quarantined deep in the darkest heart of Dogfood City.
DevOps is dead, SRE is the future (Score:1)
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First, I'll say if you think SRE is new you haven't read the book or been around this part of the industry that long.
He addresses DevOps in the book. SRE and its concepts have been around longer. "DevOps" has a larger scope, but effectively the same approach to the problem SRE tries to solve.
Both terms are widely abused in the industry, in the public, and quite obviously on Slashdot. I can understand the confusion. So let's look at the job titles and terms' usage in industry:
As far as job titles go, my
What do you expect with bean counters in control? (Score:2)
Developers don't know much about deploying
That's what you get when you can the more experienced, more expensive developers for twice or three times the number of code monkeys.
DevOps was and is a poorly conceived fantasy (Score:1)
I think that DevOps was dreamed up by a bunch of bean-counters (CIOs, CFOs, Accountants, etc.) to reduce headcount and make the developers (the "Dev" part) be responsible also for deployment and operation (the "Ops" part) of the infrastructure and systems. Because, they argue, that Developers can deploy code, but Operations personnel cannot develop applications. It was doomed to fail from the outset. Any decent software developer who is an analytical, creative and disciplined designer and writer of comput
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"I think that DevOps was dreamed up by a bunch of bean-counters (CIOs, CFOs, Accountants, etc.) to reduce headcount and make the developers (the "Dev" part) be responsible also for deployment and operation (the "Ops" part) of the infrastructure and systems."
If you spent five minutes researching the history, you would know that you are entirely wrong.
Call it something else (Score:2)
The need for automated deployment isn't going anywhere. The bigger your site, the more important it is to have automation in place. It doesn't matter whether you are running on servers in the next room, or on Amazon, you still have to have a reliable deployment mechanism, unless you can tolerate prolonged outages. DevOps might be called something else, but it's not going away.
He does not understand DevOps (Score:2)
The idea of DevOps is to improve the communication between operation and development. Especially as software becomes more fluid, the constant change requires not only improvements in development, but also methods to deploy the software without destroying the system and without giving the admins a headake .
In the beginning was the word (Score:2)
In the beginning was the word
and the word was buzz and it was bad.
Then Satan moved over the face of of the CIO and said:
"Let there be darkness"
And the evening was really dawn, and it was already the fifth day because it was crunch time.
Then Satan said "let there be bugs"
and there were bugs. Boy were there bugs...
Complete and utter bovine effluent (Score:2)
Jeez, you totally looking at the wrong thing (Score:1)
DevOps is a process not a product (Score:2)
"DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground."
This quote got it right. But there are problems:
Companies want to sell a product.
Right, "I want buy a hundred units of teamwork please."
Devs quite often see it as a way to bypass Operations:
"We will automate everything so we won't need any pesky sysadmins."
Ops are often in charge of NO:
"No thank you. We don't trust development and our way works just fine."
Tool chains and other too
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Holy jesusballs that is a lot of typos
Looks like lack of Unicode support to me. Let's hope Whipslash et al are on it.
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