[jpswade]

Here we go again.

The view in this article is that DevOps is a role, it was never meant to be this way.

The whole purpose of DevOps was to break down barriers between Dev and Ops, by not creating specialist roles and allowing developers to take ownership of ops, removing the need for the SysAdmin gates.

Instead what this article highlights is that we’ve moved the complexity to specialist tools which require another specialist role.

I would say this suggests you’re solving the wrong problem.

[benjaminwootton]

I’ve never really gotten this argument. People can go really deep on Terraform, Cloud Automation, CI/CD, containerisation etc without being developers or sysadmins.

“DevOps Engineer” fits that role perfectly in spite of the breaking-down-siloes goodness.

[jpswade]

The DevOps tool chain has become so complex that it requires specialist roles that create knowledge silos.

The goal of DevOps was to remove those gates and silos. It was meant to be about skills over roles.

All we appear to have done is change the tools and role from that of a SysAdmin to DevOps engineer.

[igetspam]

Then you're doing it wrong. My teams have two components that require review from a specific group:

1. Core infra

2. Anything related to security

Outside of those, we all can and do work on everything else. We regularly coach people in terraform and third party APIs to endure they understand that they own their application lifecycle. They control the entire SDLC and we work together to ensure sanity. There are lots of bumps but nobody gets a pass on understanding the in and outs of software development and management. I can't see a cloud based offering being successful without that.

[jpswade]

So you have a DevOps team?

Who is doing what wrong, according to whom?

[zarzavat]

This is just the same as when people complain that computers are getting slower even though the hardware is faster.

Software complexity expands to fill available resources. Only, in this case the available resources are manpower rather than hardware.

[syshum]

I have been hearing for at least 10 years that the role of sysadmin is dead....

Yet they are in more demand than ever today.. The role has changed, sysadmins today need to know more things that were exclusive to "devs" in the past, like version control... but administering systems weather they are fields of cloud cattle or onprem pet servers I still do not see the role of sysadmin going away...

sysadmins may manage more servers per admin, they may have other roles in addition to what as traditional sysadmin 15 years ago, but the vision of the author of a magical system were devs just hand over their code to AI, I think it fantasy

[nosvince]

I think you're mixing theory with practice; DevOps should not be a role, but it often is...

As for requiring another specialist role, that's not the goal of building an automated system. Or at least, this specialist will not part of the team that's building the product, but rather of the company that's building this automated platform. If you can automate the orchestration and management of Kubernetes or serverless, then developers just need to know how to build a container or upload code on a serverless platform.

[nodejs_rulez_1]

> allowing developers to take ownership of ops

But did you raise devs' pay accordingly? Nah, let someone else handle devops - I will focus on dev,thanks.

[laurent92]

We reassigned time. It’s not like you work 50hrs instead of 40.

At the time of Agile I used to hear managers say it’s a way to stress the developer more and make him work longer. No. Agile a way to relieve stress and improve adequation using tighter feedback loops.

Same for DevOps. DevOps is a way to close the feedback loop so developers don’t just throw the binaries over the fence and let sysadmins deal with stacktraces (by submitting a Jira ticket obviously). You’ll then be incentivized into developing production-proof software and prove it by supporting it; while you have other colleagues developing other features.

[pjmlp]

It is more than a role, in many companies it even has a career path.