Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

The term "DevOps" is now meaningless. The search for a new short term to describe "operations and development teams working together using high quality software tools to define, automate and distribute configuration and management information, integrating QA, release management and security" has begun.

View on HN

I gave myself a title at my last job that more accurately reflected the nature of the work - Senior Software Therapist. You get what you put into it, hopefully you don’t need the person for long, but most people that start it will probably not listen to the therapist and stay in treatment for longer. If your software and organization building and running it works 100% fine then you don’t need the therapist.

I have not gotten much traction.

Perhaps because of mental illness stigmas? Also, if you're a therapist, then you're more of a software engineering organizational therapist - it isn't the software that needs therapy, it's the organization building and maintaining it.

> "operations and development teams working together using high quality software tools to define, automate and distribute configuration and management information, integrating QA, release management and security"

This description has enough wiggle room that you could sail an aircraft carrier through it. I don't think there can be a short term to describe all that and stay meaningful; the term "devops" itself has always been quite fuzzy, and every person you'd ask would explain it differently.

Not really, it's all in the first bit:

"devops: operations and development teams working together."

If so, then why add all these other words?

Part of turning a plain old good idea into a consulting phenomenon? See: agile, scrum.

The discussion about how DevOps is an overloaded term is definitely now meaningless, in that it's been discussed ad nauseam.

In the meantime, interesting work continues to be done developing the ideas of DevOps and extending them.

[1] The Site Reliability Workbook, from Google, 2018 https://books.google.com/books?id=fElmDwAAQBAJ

[2] Securing DevOps, Julien Vehent, 2018 https://www.manning.com/books/securing-devops

It makes almost no sense for a tech platform to be a DevOps tool. It's like saying saying a programming language is better at supporting agile. DevOps is a matter of how you assign responsibility to people in your org. Not how they get there.

Some languages are better at supporting agile development. The idea behind agile is that things change, so your language needs to help rather than hinder those changes. It should make separation of concerns / single-responsibility easy, rather than something you have to fight the language for.

The idea behind DevOps is integration between development and operations, in a way that eases automation of tasks where they interact. A platform absolutely can provide a structured way to do that integration, or can interfere with it.

That is a great sentence, thanks for writing that.

I personally dont like the term devops either... I prefer a more specific definition fo a role.

DevOps is not a role, it's a culture and set of processes to improve speed of delivery through interaction and teamwork between development and operations.

The discipline broadly described as "DevOps engineering" is just a way for employers to get senior staff to do the work that really should be handled by multiple, narrower disciplines (e.g., security engineers, automation engineers, tooling engineers, etc.) for a lower cost.

Perhaps you would re-read what I wrote? I didn't suggest that people should add more hats -- I suggested that people should cooperate more, and learn from each other.

It makes no sense to have a security policy and an implementation of that policy and not have it be automatically distributed and applied, for instance. And security implementations should be tested just as much as any other code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com