[vosper]

I don't think DevOps was really supposed to mean "developers should also do operations" (though, that's a lot of what has actually happened, and you're right that with Cloud Stuff and other third-party solutions like Heroku a lot of specialist sysadmin-era knowledge isn't needed in many places anymore)...

I think it's actually supposed to mean "the people doing operations should also be developers". They should have the technical skills and the agency to create software to solve their problems. And to the extent that sysadmins hacked together perl scripts or bash scripts to solve problems, it is presumed that it would be better if they were more skilled software engineers who would have hacked together better solutions - maybe less arcane, less one-man-band, better abstractions, reusable, less copy-paste, etc... I don't know if that's fair.

I think it's half true and half rebranding. DevOps theory - and the services that go with / enabled it - has really changed how a lot of software teams work. And the rebranding helps with the paycheck, too - which is why all your DevOps teams are now restyling themselves as SREs (and hey, if they actually do some of the SRE stuff then it's a win, right?)

[jvagner]

Most devops I’ve run into aren’t doing devops. Devops, against sysadmin, build and manage the systems that manage the systems, hopefully as automations or infra-as-a-service or software defined infra. When you think you’re devops but you’re barely sysadmin you’re probably just an interrupt driven ops person who gets to sysadmin during build-outs or maintenance.

[vosper]

Hah, yah you might have nailed it there

[0x445442]

I like your take on the situation and I like the idea of DevOps being a more formalized version of system administration using infrastructure as code. Unfortunately, what I think it is in most places is middle management playing games with the three legged stool. Application design and development is really quite a different discipline than configuration management and administration. And if you want quality across the board those roles will, for the most part, need to be separated.