will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!
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Hi all, am system admin from India and am confused with devops, what it is and how it going to change IT culture or it is just myth :unamused_face:
can anyone here explain it in sysadmin point of view and developer point of view :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:
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DevOps = System Admin. So one can't eliminate the other. DevOps is simply an advanced means of doing systems administration.
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@roopankumar said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
... it is just myth :unamused_face:
DevOps is where many of us have been working for a very long time. It can't be a myth, it's everywhere.
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/01/on-devops-and-snowflakes/
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DevOps as a term is heavily abused and not often used to mean the same thing. Traditional DevOps is all that there ever was, developers were the sysops in the old days, universally. Then they were split into two groups.
Today, most people use the term DevOps to mean some combination of "software defined infrastruction" and "using traditionally development tools by system admins."
Things that are typically used for DevOps include state management systems like Salt, Ansible, Chef, cfEngine, and Puppet. Plus things like Git, Subversion, Mercurial. You'll likely use advanced editors like Atom or VS Code.
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DevOps is almost to me a Buzzword, just to look or sound cool.
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@dbeato said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
DevOps is almost to me a Buzzword, just to look or sound cool.
It's used that way, much like Cloud Computing is. However, both are similar in that they are abused by people that do not know what they are, but are very meaningful and really are important aspects of the industry.
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@scottalanmiller is actually talking about more part of the practical implementation of DevOps, rather than what DevOps is.
One way of looking at DevOps is Developers and Operations working together to accomplish the goals that actually help the business as a whole, rather than accomplishing their own separate goals - which can conflict and end up not actually providing value to the business.
Another way to look at it is the way software development applies Lean manufacturing methods.
When someone is advertising for a "DevOps Engineer" as a job description they probably don't know what they're talking about and what the role actually is is a System Administrator at a company that develops their own software who knows certain tools/workflows. (or it's fake)
If your company doesn't develop any software, then you're not doing DevOps. You are just using better tools that to do system administration, and your workflow will have some resemblance to a developer's workflow. But using Git and Salt and editing yaml files is not software development, you're just Ops using certain kinds of tools.
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It seems like a way to translate your title's question would be, will better software/automation and processes have an impact on the jobs of System Admins (quantity and level of technical skill required)?
And as will pretty much any profession, the answer is yes.
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@flaxking said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
@scottalanmiller is actually talking about more part of the practical implementation of DevOps, rather than what DevOps is.
One way of looking at DevOps is Developers and Operations working together to accomplish the goals that actually help the business as a whole, rather than accomplishing their own separate goals - which can conflict and end up not actually providing value to the business.
Part of the definition of DevOps is that it is also for infrastructure management. That is the part of the definition that is being discussed when people through the term around like they through around "cloud".
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@jaredbusch said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
@flaxking said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
@scottalanmiller is actually talking about more part of the practical implementation of DevOps, rather than what DevOps is.
One way of looking at DevOps is Developers and Operations working together to accomplish the goals that actually help the business as a whole, rather than accomplishing their own separate goals - which can conflict and end up not actually providing value to the business.
Part of the definition of DevOps is that it is also for infrastructure management. That is the part of the definition that is being discussed when people through the term around like they through around "cloud".
Saying that DevOps is "for infrastructure management" doesn't really make sense. DevOps implies infrastructure management. In DevOps, infrastructure has to be managed in such a way that helps meet the goals of DevOps. However, in some situations it would be possible to follow DevOps using 'snowflake' servers.
When people pass around DevOps as a buzzword, they aren't actually talking about DevOps itself, just the way DevOps has typically been practically implemented. And it's hard not to talk about that, because following thee beaten path is the easiest way to get started with DevOps, but if you never look at the big picture of what it actually is you are trying to accomplish a lot is being missed out on.
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It's about a focus of IT leveraging infrastructure, tools (like automation and self-service), and collaboration to better accommodate software development teams in building, testing, and releasing software faster and more reliably. (my definition)
One really easy example is, implementing a cloudstack such as Apache CloudStack, System Center VMM, oVirt, etc... with IT configuring the environment for self-service so Devs can quickly spin up a VM, test software, kill the VM, and do it again. This is in addition to what others are saying as well, such as config management like SaltStack, and implementing Git.
However, as a buzzword I think it's referred to more as a relationship between Developers and IT... not IT doing developer-like work (like coding)... but it does involve scripting / automation.
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@tim_g said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
However, as a buzzword I think it's referred to more as a relationship between Developers and IT... not IT doing developer-like work (like coding)... but it does involve scripting / automation.
I can't figure out how often that is true. There is one camp that has the two merged, this comes from the 1960s and is nothing new at all. The other is the Infrastructure as Code crew. People seem to randomly mean either one or the other at any particular time and there is no way to tell which is which.
Merging dev and ops is really silly, two very different disciplines that split for key reasons. But IT using everything at their disposal to do advanced IT is very sensible.
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@scottalanmiller said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
@tim_g said in will Devops kick out System admins ?? !!!:
However, as a buzzword I think it's referred to more as a relationship between Developers and IT... not IT doing developer-like work (like coding)... but it does involve scripting / automation.
I can't figure out how often that is true. There is one camp that has the two merged, this comes from the 1960s and is nothing new at all. The other is the Infrastructure as Code crew. People seem to randomly mean either one or the other at any particular time and there is no way to tell which is which.
Merging dev and ops is really silly, two very different disciplines that split for key reasons. But IT using everything at their disposal to do advanced IT is very sensible.
At my job I am both Senior Ops and Junior Dev. Two separate roles, I even have two separate workstation VMs. Sometimes I'm doing Dev work, sometimes I am doing Ops work. The only way this is itself is related to DevOps is that if I have to do some Dev to support my Ops, there is less handoffs. Reducing the number of handoffs is a big thing in DevOps, and thus some companies will employ people with experience in both as a part of their DevOps strategy, but it is not what DevOps means.
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We can look at DevOps as an extension of Lean manufacturing, with extras added like the Toyota Kata, and modifications made in order to make with work better and make sense to software development.
It is a great case study of how to successfully apply Lean to a different industry, and a great many things can be taken from it in order to apply to other industries.
For example, I know of a botched implementation of applying Lean to healthcare, and I believe if a DevOps style route was taken, it would be more successful. DevOps isn't applying straight Lean itself but making modifications where it makes sense, and I think a lot of the modifications made by DevOps would make sense to other industries.
There is "Lean IT", but I would be wary of applying it without doing some studying on DevOps first, since I view DevOps as the gold standard of how to apply Lean to your industry (aside from the whole buzzword confusion)
