DevOps is Dead! Long Live Devs!
A lifetime ago in the world of IT, or in normal years about five years ago, just when DevOps second wave was taking shape, I argued that DevOps is not that bright idea. DevOps crashed the first wave, it failed to deliver, so they were mounting a second one. I was confused especially by Ops people’s push for DevOps adoption. I was pretty sure they would be the first to get hurt. I was not the only one airing this opinion (Knupp was one, whom I still remember), but there was not that many of us. Pushing onto devs the duties that fall onto ops, which what DevOps was turning into, was a recipe for ops people to lose their jobs.
The reason is very simple and to me kind of obvious, developers can do ops jobs, ops people cannot do developers jobs. To became a really good operations person takes about a month of studying. I am not joking, or trying to minimise (now non-existent) ops, from my experience, that is the case. To become a great developer requires continuous learning for years and decades. There really is no comparison between those two. Developer can go on a week long course and come back with enough knowledge as an average ops person. The only thing that was working for Ops was that developers quite often do not want to work on the server. I hate setting up servers and often will refuse to have credentials to access a machine and do things to it. That doesn’t mean I cannot do it, just that I dislike spending time on doing that. Developers are also very lazy. Some of the best developers are the laziest people I know. If we can make way to not do things, we will. Unfortunately, that is what actually killed DevOps and ops in particular.
Immediately upon DevOps birth, developers started trying to get rid of operations part of their jobs. Chef and Puppet popped up almost the same year, but were stuck in the old ways of thinking like an ops person, even though one could write code to execute majority of ops work through them, developers did not want to learn it. Ops survived for a couple of years. Several years later, a developer, Solomon Hykes, released first version of Docker. Docker was and still is way better and way cooler technology than Chef or Puppet. It was a leap in right direction, but there was still almost a need for somebody who knew YAML and setting up servers. It took about a year to remove need for that as well by launching serverless architectures.
These days, there is really no need for Ops, except if your business is offering managed infrastructures. If you are setting up machines, you are doing things wrong. Everything is hanging in managed infrastructure. If Lambdas are not enough, search for a container that closely resembles your needs and push a button. If you never had a whale resting in your system tray, you are not doing things as well as you could.
DevOps is Dead, Long Live Devs
