On a serious note, you are absolutely right. IT always had two opposing forces for a reason, it provided balance between change and sustainability. The big problem was lack of communication between the two sides, which "devops" was supposed to solve.
Instead, "devops" is now developers doing what they've always done, and caring for change above all like they always did, but pretending to care about the needs of services in production. I cringe when I think about all those containers where the application is continuously delivered but the bundled openssl isn't updated when vulnerabilities are found. Welcome to the brave new world.
We're moving in a no-ops direction mainly because the most vocal folks come from startups that don't last enough to see where coherent operations matter. They go under well before that. But this idea is bleeding onto companies where it does matter, and we'll see how that goes in a few years.
I think/hope we might see this change soon. Currently there's no real penalty for poor ops. If your customer data gets hacked, there are very few actual penalties, most of the pain is in reputation. I feel like there's been a lot of pressure to have government penalties for poor security practices, especially when so many companies "need" all the user data they can get their hands on.
You say that like it's a bad thing. If you want DevOps to be successful, you don't hire a "DevOps team". You hire a team of devs to make ops tools that are so easy to use that all the other devs can manage their own ops.
The idea is that doing "good ops" is so easy that everyone in the company does it.
In my experience, "good ops" people are the ones with lots of war stories to tell of disasters or narrowly averted disasters either of their own of of friend/colleagues they hang out with. It's a profession who's lessons seem to be best-taught by spectacular failures and heroic recovery efforts, rather than college courses, vendor/consultant training, or "industry best practices" documents...
We used to have people to make those ops tools, we called them ops. The whole devops things seems to be based on the false notion that ops didn't automate their work.
This is a bit too much.
I'm not saying that Fortune 500 companies should use DO, but I don't see what's wrong with having a couple of servers for your 50k visitors per month web-app.
Sure "do-it-right" will be hard, but with DO you can literally buy yourself more time until you are able to hire the right people to do that.
It's about context. Your 50k visitor a month webapp doesn't need a load balancer. When you actually need a load balancer, chances are you need someone to deal with myriad other reliability concerns as well.
I hate being woken at night by emergency calls, so I would prefer to set everyone and everything up with HA solutions.
Either my workload is atypical or people massively overestimate the server power they need.
Now your 100k/month platform is down for 3 days.
You've saved something like $40/month (two additional app/db vms plus a load balancer), but a failure could realistically cost you 1/10th of a month of downtime (which, simplistically looks like $10k). Do you think your platform with two single points of failure is _not_ going to go down like this sometime in the next 5 years?
(Of course, a weekend's worth of downtime might not be a 10% revenue hit - but depending on your SLAs and penalties it's also possible to be a lot more than that...)
You're suggesting that because a company without any experienced Ops staff makes bad decisions about their Infra, if the same company had experienced Ops staff, those staff would somehow make even worse decisions about their Infra?
If the company doesn't hire a couple of experienced Ops people to manage their could infrastructure, why do you think they will do a good job hiring a team? You can shoot your self in the foot with any gun. However, one path requires many more choices, more people, and more process to get it right. If they can't get the simpler path right, than what makes you think they will be able to go down the more complex path?
For my experience, the average company with on premises servers with a Ops staff is horrible, unsustainable, overpriced, insecure and failing.
Yeah, if you have no ops staff, and try to run your own servers you're going to do something terrible. No one is suggesting that.
For the last 5 or 6 years, people have been waving their arms saying platforms as a service (Heroku, etc) or containers eliminate the need for servers. Howerver, the cloud server market has only ballooned in size. AWS has continued to explode with huge revenue numbers. Google Cloud is fasty maturing and a threat to Amazon. Azure is competing as well. Servers aren't going away.. Ops aren't going anywhere...
Anyway, I bring up this rant, because I just founded my third startup Elastic Byte (https://elasticbyte.net) which is a DevOps and cloud infrastructure management as a service. If anybody is looking for professional ops to manage their cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, Azure) I'd love to chat.
Now however you can start a business in your basement that has global reach. It's still a small business, and it's still likely asymmetric in its ability to execute, but now it has high visibility. What is more it depends on network infrastructure in order to work.
Everyone wants to be the Microsoft Back Office version of "cloud". Install it, click the defaults, and it provides the infrastructure you need to run your small business.
On the other hand, you have developers / small teams who are just trying to get things off the ground and want some basic redundancy and other benefits of load balancing. That's the primary audience of such service, in my opinion. Sure, you can just spin up HAProxy and even a very basic configuration might do the job. But it's one more thing to learn and maintain, often one more thing to train people to work with, etc. The same can be said about other popular managed services, including Amazon S3, RDS etc. It's a decision you have to make.
So I truly understand your position but I don't think that such sarcastic attitude actually helps anyone.
"The Cloud" lets us do WAY better on reliability and a little cheaper on cost than we could with our own bare metal servers.
I do wish I could drop a Samsung PRO 960 in our database VM though :(
Consider Hetzner if you want high IO at low prices. You'll get "regular" SSDs in their VPSs, but you can get mirrored NVMe SSDs in their bare metal servers [1]. Nothing but great experiences with them. They have APIs to let you automate provisioning of the bare-metal servers if you want to tie it into a larger cloud deployment
[1] https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/px61nv...