[icedchai]

Most "DevOps" folks I know are actually former sysadmins who evolved to work more with cloud technologies. To say sysadmin hasn't evolved in a bit of an exaggeration. Titles follow the trend. What people actually do is often similar.

[dielectrikboog]

No, it isn’t an exaggeration. They ceded one particular competency, systems administrator, and now pay cloud providers to do it instead. The job didn’t go anywhere. Capacity planning, change management, peering, supply chain management, all of that stuff is still happening, they just willingly tapped out of it and took another job (probably because the DevOps people came in with a slide deck and hand waved them out of a job at the SVP level).

That is not evolution (nor an indictment of those people, importantly). The side effect, which literally nobody is paying attention to, is a future where computing as a concept is concentrating on a few major companies. Every every every every single person who says “why would I buy a rack? There’s AWS” is furthering that outcome.

[icedchai]

You still need to do capacity planning, change management, monitoring, etc. within your cloud environment. Those AWS instances and the software their running doesn't manage itself. For some subset of "cloud", such as PaaS providers like Heroku, etc., you are absolutely correct. For another subset of "cloud", you still need sysadmin / ops skills to manage it.

[dielectrikboog]

Yeah, you do. It’s a shame pretty much every single cloud-native shop in existence, you know, doesn’t bother, and pushes out the people arguing for bothering. I’ve been at this nearly two decades, and I have yet to find engineers even running an Excel notebook of inventory, much less capacity planning. You know, because describe-instances and monitoring and Ansible and Chef and blah blah.

My role right now is telling a major government agency how much they’re wasting on Azure. You know, because describe-instances. It’s a lot, and I think there might be a business model in “let me at your API for a week and give me 10%.” I’d be retired by Labor Day.

Reminder: They’re sending Congressionally appropriated funds. To Redmond. And they’re not entirely sure why, in $millions of cases. Line up fifty startups that have had a Demo Day and I’d bet you’d find the same thing in fifty-one of them.

That’s the DevOps legacy: don’t mind the budget, because AWS, Azure, and GCP have our financial interests in mind and APIs are cheaper to staff than fiber. Parades of like-minded individuals came to D.C. and said “DevOps! Do it!” and the agencies are now increasingly beholden to organizations incentivized by profit and those contractors took their Innovation Award check and don’t return the “um, what now?” calls. That’s the mess I’m trying to help clean up, and it’s happening across every major governmental organ in the United States.

[icedchai]

I won't argue that running your own infrastructure is a better deal for many types of applications, especially if you can plan everything out, forecast usage, etc. There is absolutely a lot of waste in cloud spending. I've found tons of it myself. Cloud "cost optimization" is definitely a good business.

What "cloud" really buys you is flexibility. I also don't really miss the days of buying my own servers, lugging them into a data center, waiting for drops to be provisioned, going there late at night when there's a failure, or talking remote hands through stuff.

[potta_coffee]

As a developer, I'm not happy about it either. I'm now expected to write code, as fast as possible, and then handle all the ops / sysadmin tasks too, which I don't enjoy and am not really equipped to handle.

[chrisweekly]

But wait, aren't you "full-stack"? That means you also know all the minutia of UI animation rendering performance optimizations across the mobile landscape, right?

[potta_coffee]

I can "get by", but that doesn't mean I'm able to do an excellent job on every aspect. It's definitely a long chain of compromises.

[chrisweekly]

My point precisely.

[icedchai]

Yes! Most developers don't want to do operations work. It's not their specialty, and often uninteresting to them. A good team will let developers actually develop.