So you mean, DevOps has made Sysadmins more service oriented and now instead of having their pets and being in overprotective silos, they actually provide best practices and proper platforms for the poeple developing the software?
In the old days we had so few deploys and a hotfix was something that was extraordinary. I actually had a board of something in another country approving that we where allowed to deploy. They knew nothing about the application..
yes this server is special to me. No, I cannot move workloads somewhere else and shoot the server in the head. Because customers are running GPU workloads there, I cannot transparently migrate them
What I hate is the attitude of "treating your server is a pet is wrong, you should be able to kill it and replace any time". I feel like people who say it never run anything more complex than an HTTP API.
My (Raspberry Pi) home server is very much a pet, but I'm never going to productionize that thing, so I'm totally fine with it being a pet, despite the practice at work of having no pets, all cattle.
The place it worked the best was where a team of sysadmins were split up and embedded with each dev team. each devop would then rotate onto another team every 6 months or so. This meant that _we_ had to document our shit for the next devop, but also helped eliminate key person dependencies.
We would then have a weekly offsite where we'd bitch and moan about our teams and conspire to make things better.