There will be specialisation once again, because it makes absolutely no sense to make people whose main job it is to think about use cases, business logic and user interfaces to also deal with stuff like this.
In this way, devs will be doing ops, but not as ops for any given prod environment, rather encoding operational tasks in reusable software.
Ops themselves will bifurcate, one towards configuring prebuilt controllers, others towards troubleshooting problems in production. The middle ground will hollow out.
But more broadly, Kubernetes in the hands of most developers that are doing non-platform level work is a step backwards and will be disastrous. It's far too low level, it's like, hey this Python/Ruby/Java thing was great, but have you seen this new bytecode linker and assembler?
New platforms and runtime built ON TOP OF Kubernetes are probably going to be fine. But that's going to take a while.
Everyone who comments about DevOps should have read "The Phoenix Project" first, so that they understand what you just said. It's not about consolidating workloads onto generalists, it's supposed to be about breaking down the silos in an organization, nothing more!
You are right. What I should have said is that using DevOps as an excuse to make application developers do complex infrastructure design, automation and maintainance as a side-job is an unsustainable practice.
The idea that this will kill "devops" is ludicrious, because devops doesn't actually replace job titles. We have a "Devops engineer". He's an ops engineer, with "dev" in front of his title because he codes in perl and python (...like an op). Visual Studio is a "DevOps Environment". I don't know what this means. It likely means that it can provide end-to-end integration in your development environment, which was previously an IDE. The idea behind devops being a raised layer of abstraction is fine, but we don't really need a new word for it, and as history has shown, raised abstractions do not lower. We're going to end up with "devops" until we find a new buzzword.
There are, however, a number of people in the field that are all ops and have no development abilities. There is less and less of a need for those kinds of people.
This has been hashed about at length, but the inverse is also true. Developers must learn to operate their software in production.
I very strongly disagree, unless what you mean by "no development abilities" is merely an inability (or refusal) to write or modify (maybe debug) code. There is here, what I believe, a very important distinction, that is routinely lost, and has all but totally devalued Ops skills in the minds of many tech hiring managers who have exclusively programming backgrounds.
I was on a phone interview today, in fact, lamenting, along with my interviewer, that there exist such sysadmins who don't even write scripts or automation. He suggested that they've started to call themselves "IT", and, IMO, that may well be a more apt term even than "Ops". My own experience is that, back in the dark ages, a traditional sysadmin not only had to be proficient at scripting but also at some amount of C just to port open source tools between various proprietary Unix version, especially with new releases.
That does not, however, bestow upon me, anything that I could call, with a straight face, "development abilities". I hold in my head none of the best practices having to do with programming that have accumulated over the 3 decades of my career, for example. Instead, I hold the Ops best practices. Being able to implement FizzBuzz in bash is neither necessary nor sufficient for software development.
> Developers must learn to operate their software in production.
I disagree here, as well, on behalf of developers.
I think you'll find having to learn what is, essentially, a completely separate, new, engineering discipline, in addition to software development, severely cuts into their productivity.
Unless I bring production to the developers, almost like bringing the upstairs downstairs in the cartoon pushbutton house[1]. I do actually feel it's a responsibility of Ops as part of Devops culture to create as frictionless (for their needs) a simulation of production as possible for developers. The practice has all sorts of benefits, including eliminating "works on my machine" debugging issues, that has been one of the rallying cries for containers.
[1] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080403063620A...
Not everyone does the same job you do, even if they might share the same job title. I'm proficient in bash and python, have been learning rust, and know enough c to get around, but there have been many years in my career where my actual sysadmin duties required little more than being able to do 'while true; do x; done'
That's very much not been the case over the past half decade, but there were times in the 2000s where nothing was necessary beyond some basic bash scripts. No writing, modifying, or debugging of anything I would actually call code was needed.
I've also done hundreds of interviews for sysadmin positions. I'd say the minority of them were proficient beyond the very basics of bash. Most of them seemed to be doing well enough in their existing roles to not have been fired.
shrugs
That's true about any title across the entire computer industry (and maybe all technology), but it doesn't say anything about the categories those jobs fall into and skills/experience associated with those categories.
> my actual sysadmin duties required little more than being able to do 'while true; do x; done'
If you mean that was the level of the complexity of the scripting/automation required, there's nothing wrong with that. Consider, however, trying to do even that, without any scripting at all.
Presumably something like 'do x', up-arrow, return, up-arrow, return, ad infinitum. Apparently, that's the kind of person that's moved into "IT" that was being described to me, though this was pure hearsay.
> That's very much not been the case over the past half decade, but there were times in the 2000s where nothing was necessary beyond some basic bash scripts. No writing, modifying, or debugging of anything I would actually call code was needed.
That would be comfortably (up to a decade) past the dark ages to which I referred. Please don't misinterpret my mentioning having had to work with C as being in contrast to basic bash scripts.
My point was actually quite the opposite, that it's all code, but that it's a form of working with code that is (at least subjectively) different from software development.
As someone doing the hiring for such things, people looking to get hired seem to have a different view of things. I don't need someone with an advanced degree in CS and mastery of algorithms to produce API endpoints and orchestration bits.
As for having software developers handing off their software for someone else to operate, well, that's an anti-pattern that inhibits throughput and software quality. There's quite a bit of data around this topic. I would encourage you to read this book:
https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/
I'll grant you that it's difficult to get there in a traditional IT org, but once you do get there, the results are glorious.
No dissonance from my end, and I'd say that other than the very narrow overlap of being able to "write code", that's quite distinct from what, for example, my Ops skills are.
To be fair, I did think of some other potential relatively narrow overlaps, such as revision control systems, strace/dtrace, and debuggers, but the latter is a bit tenuous, since it's a niche/vintage skill. Even with VCSes, I don't need, know, or use most features (and miss features like "svn export").
> As for having software developers handing off their software for someone else to operate, well, that's an anti-pattern that inhibits throughput and software quality.
You may be implying a false dichotomy (or maybe I'm reading one in that you didn't intend). I don't think anyone, myself included, is advocating in favor of the "throw it over the wall" anti-pattern that the original Devops cultural movement advocated so vehemently against.
I absolutely agree that developers should remain responsible for the operation of their software in production and, to whatever extent necessary, be involved in that operation. I'm also saying that if "whatever extent necessary" isn't remarkably minimal, it indicates something seriously wrong with the software, with the production-like development environment Ops is providing (i.e. implementation of Devops culture), or both.
My main worry is that specialization won't return soon and my Ops skills won't be enough to keep me employed.
> I've been doing Ops for 20 years and even back in the 90's I barely had to understand what a Make file was doing. I've certainly never had to do much actual dev work.
Although I ended up being pretty comfortable with Make, I wouldn't characterize what I did with it as actual dev work, either. The vast majority was tweaks of existing makefiles to get them to work on new platforms.
I'm not sure even the devs I worked with back then had as much exposure to Make as did the release engineers (part of QA).
> My main worry is that specialization won't return soon and my Ops skills won't be enough to keep me employed.
The latter part may end up being true regardless, in which case Ops skills will eventually be lost, to the detriment of the industry.
I doubt it, however, because even in the vast majority of Devops-as-a-title job postings, no matter how much emphasis is placed on automation, building internal tools, CI/CD, "dev", or "infrastructure as code", Ops skills (some of which those arguably were or overlap with) are still key. Otherwise, they'd just be hiring developers and having them perform these functions [1].
All that said, I don't know what the right answer is for staying employable.
I know it's not merely waiting for (a subset of) skills from the 90s to become valuable enough again. That would be doubling-down on what might be too narrow a specialization. However, even making sure one has at least some expertise in as broad range of Ops skills as possible, including networking, databases, and especially enough coding to enable routine (if basic) automation, may not be enough.
Maybe the answer is acquire just enough dev skills to get hired into those hybrid roles and then either wait until the Ops part becomes important enough to be full time or deliver so much more value with Ops than dev that the latter responsibilities get transferred to someone else. I have, so far, not done this, both because it feels slightly dishonest and because, like in the footnoted situation, I fear it leads to lower productivity/quality on the Ops side.
[1] Judging by some comments I've seen here, this also happens but has not yielded a large set of examples of successful outcomes (including keeping those developers happy and productively developing)
I think containers is the future but we need idiot-proof GUI systems that Heroku and similar services provide to wire up our applications, and we need a good way to handle persistence, which many modern tools ignore.
Kubernetes' uptake is nowhere close to AWS by any measure. And AWS is the #1 public cloud that hosts Kubernetes workloads.
It's every IT vendor in the world vs. AWS, and so far, they're winning. Kubernetes and open platforms have a shot, but they're not moving fast enough yet in the direction that matters - up the stack.
Rolled it back into KVM/QEMU in colo with a glue layer REST interface over virsh and will never look back.
Of course we don't use containers..they don't offer an overt benefit in HPC...and I don't think they ever will.
There is a much bigger market for infrastructure in the cloud than people realize, and I will be very surprised if kubernetes is not replaced in 5 years.
The reason for this is the enormous cost benefits (its super cheap, you only pay when your code actually runs, no upfront costs, no passive server costs, no overprovision or underprovision of compute resources etc).
The servless approach has its place just like everything else, it’s not a panacea though.
As someone trying to be primarily a dev who keeps getting roped into doing ops stuff for deploying my stuff, my experience is the exact opposite, and in particular putting Kubernetes on the end as the least complicated technology seems outright crazy to me, like, seriously, what on Earth are you talking about? You literally can't bring up a hello world web app without basically knowing everything you needed to know to bring it up on bare metal, and everything you needed to know to bring it up on a VM (whose crazy virtual networking stuff now seems like simplicity itself compared to Docker/Kubernetes), and everything you need to know to bring it up in Docker, and everything you need to know to bring it up in Kubernetes... and you need some sort of solution around building Docker images, too, so you're still going to need to know that, too.
There's all kinds of reasons this is necessary and there's all kinds of reasons why provising a new hardware server, blasting a Linux distro on to it, and just running your server is a bad idea. By no means am I proposing we need to go back to some glorious past, where losing a single hard drive sector means "oh well, guess the database is gone! recovery plan? Our recovery plan is to not need the database anymore!" I'm just saying, it's crazy to think this is all getting simpler. Try looking at this through the eyes of a fresh grad sometime.
Granted, I'm a bit crabby that literally every time I go to deploy something new, on a roughly 18 month time frame (the intervening time being maintenance and feature development), I have to go learn something else for my one-off task. (I don't think devops manages to beat the Node/JS world for churn, but it's probably in second place.) But still, it's getting more and more complicated, not less, and I don't even sense that we've passed an inflection point on the complexity reducing yet.
Those "all kinds of reasons" aren't necessarily valid, though, because it's not actually possible to go back to that caricature of the past that you describe.
The reason it's not possible is that some things actually have gotten simpler, at least from a user's perspective.
Automatic bad-block relocation has been standard for effectively forever. Even line-speed hardware RAID has been affordable for so long that it's not even a question. Hardware, in general, is routinely villified as being a nightmare, when the reality is that it's boringly reliable and, more importantly, has predictable enough failure rates that there are simple, standard engineering solutions around the failures (often already baked in).
That "inflection point" may well just end up being peeling away all the abstraction layers to discover that simplicity underneath works just fine, since we don't live in the 20th century any more.
What will very likely not be going away in the next decade is networks.
Unless we can build tooling for setting up the network infrastructure below all these cloud tools, you will still be stuck with people doing admin work like 30 years ago. From personal experience: k8s clusters are easy. Building the hardware and especially networking below so that everything actually can be automated in k8s... whole different story.
But actually shouldering the burden of creating and maintaining the entire runtime -- and orchestrate it -- is a bit much and stretches people thin.
Writing native UI code is no more low level than using electron. It's just less familiar to web developers and less portable. These are completely different considerations than the greater degree of division of labour I'm predicting for the server side.
For one JavaScript doesn't have shared memory threads like lower level desktop languages do, it's all neatly hidden in JS event loop or your forced to go IPC route. Shared memory multithreading introduces low level complexity but brings performance benefits if you can leverage it.
Plenty of other low level APIs and technologies that you either can't use or are wrapped in higher level sandbox constructs for JS for portability, security, ease of use, whatever.
Writing native UI code often forces you to deal with low level platform specifics but you get the benefits, HTML UI is just a cheap way to do it (not meant in a derogatory way - it's easy to find devs/designers and target multiple platforms from same code base)
Without generalists with overview and situational awareness, you're going to need a lot of documentation, paperwork and meetings to preempt communication problems.
Sincerely,
DevOps guy formerly known as SysEngineer formerly known as SysAdmin for 15+ years.
Sincerly,
Platform Engineer former DevOps guy, former SysEngineer, former SysAdmin for the past 24 years.
It’s more or less a logical following of infrastructure as code, because it’s the developers who write and push those files.
Devops is/was a professional movement to get developers and operations folks to communicate with one another, create a shared value system and culture, drive continuous learning, enhance automation, visibility/metrics, so we can all build software faster safely and sustainably.
Infrastructure as code was one small aspect of this. Continuous delivery, microservices, cloud native platforms, a sharing/collaborative culture, lean product development, modern alerting/monitoring, all were part of this.
But it seems tech pop culture cliche's win out over best intentions again and again, as they did with 'agile', 'cloud', 'structured programming', 'object oriented programming', 'reactive', and 'REST'
a) The term is misappropriated to refer to some something rather different from what it was originally meant to refer to. I may be guilty of doing that.
b) The concept was too fluffy to begin with and sparked a cottage industry for consultants without helping anyone else.
c) The original ideas were flawed and have so many unintended consequences in practice that people rightly start associating the term with those negative outcomes instead of the well meaning goals.
Perhaps a bit of all the above is what's causing the dissonance here.
b) Consultants (good and bad) always sprout up in any area, and have throughout history (see: Sophists vs. Charlatans).
But, what is "fluffy" (ill-defined, nebulous, uncertain, difficult) to one person is a deep area of research for another.
Put another way, people tend to dismiss what they don't understand or can't see as unimportant. This is the "looking for your lost keys under the street lamp" syndrome. Most often people can only understand the future in terms of the past, and if they don't have past exposure to a topic, they're not going to see its relevance unless they put extraordinary effort in to pay attention.
For example (not necessarily directed at you), Devops folks really put a lot of emphasis on Lean concepts that come out of the Toyota production system. But if I think "wtf do I care about making cars?", I might think ideas like "Continuous Flow" or "Cost of Delay" as being fuzzy and irrelevant to my work as a developer. But they have huge impact over how work is organized and made productive, and literally billions of dollars have been spent developing and honing these ideas in the product manufacturing industries... that just might have broader relevance to the dysfunction of how traditional enterprises run their IT shops vs. how Amazon does.
As for c), all ideas are flawed and have unintended consequences :) , focusing too deeply on the negative is a cynical reaction that often gets back to (b).
Yes, that means infrastructure as code, including code reviews, frequent deployments, etc.
No, it doesn't require that the developers working on the devops code are the same ones who work on the app code. At a small company (e.g., three devs) they will be, but at a large company, you have a dedicated "devops team" who exclusively works on infrastructure (as code).
And I don't see DevOps becoming obsolete at all; just the other day I spend deploying apps with an ops guy, where neither of us could do it all on his own: the ops guy lacked understanding of the code bases, the endpoints to configure, and integration test procedures, me not having permissions to redeploy and view logs.