[akitzmiller]

About 20 years ago, I was at a pharmaceutical company and, to put together a web application, - we had to buy a prod and a dev database server - we had to buy a prod and a dev application server - we needed Oracle as a database - we needed a DBA, a sysadmin, and a hardware team - we needed Tomcat / Java and Oracle development expertise

The idea of developing and running this application with a single person would have been laughable.

Today, because tools are soooo accessible, I can, and do, routinely spin up my own VM, apply Puppet, drop my MySQL and Django containers onto that VM, and pull https certificates in addition to doing the front and back end software development.

Life would be waaay simpler if I could just write server side web application code and wait around for database developers, sys admins, and front-end folks to do their thing. Imagine not having to learn a testing harness because there are actually people testing the software!

[sseagull]

This is one thing I feel conflicted about. On one hand, it is a lot easier to do those things (VMs, docker, DBs, etc).

On the other hand, now a regular run-of-the-mill developer is also supposed to be knowledgeable about sooo much stuff that is not so directly related to their code. As you say, sometimes it’s nice to be able to hand that off to specialists - a person can’t be good at everything.

[unforeseen9991]

I suppose this is the void that DevOps is trying to fill

[Viliam1234]

That word seems to mean different things to different people.

I have heard on internet explanations like "it means that developers and operations are communicating more and working together as one big team", but so far every company I worked at has interpreted it like "it means that in addition to developing the application, you are also supposed to do the operations".