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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

DevOps has that meaning to you, maybe.

I would implore some reading into the origin.

Cliff notes version, things that happened around the same time:

* Dev+Ops days is made by Patrick Dubois, the intent was for Sysadmins to use Agile ("Agile Systems Administrator" was the desired job title), he used "dev"+"ops" to signify a unification in working methodology, not as a team

* 10+ deploys a day from Flickr; where the authors are in a single unified team of sysadmins and developers.

Like Agile, people always claim you're "doing it wrong", which I find ironic given that the portmanteau was created to bring Agile to systems administration itself. However, devops was confused right out of the gate.

Your definition is the 10+ deploys a day talk.

I actually wrote a blog post about this:

https://blog.dijit.sh/devops-confusion-and-frustration/

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You need to also look into why DevOps became a thing. Because devs were sick of the BS dealing with Ops teams (want a server, that will take 6 months to provision). So devs decided they could do it themselves (with better tools).

> So devs decided they could do it themselves (with better tools).

And failed. Other people’s jobs always look easy from the outside

Actually devs focusing on Ops lead to development of the automation we use today for most Ops activities, so I would say that is a success.

We already had such automation tools under system administration umbrella.

What do we think we were using Perl for?

> "What do we think we were using Perl for?"

Job Security (joking)

Scripting is not in the same league as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc. Automation at scale required the development of tools like these.

Most of those predate DevOps phenomenon, and have roots in systems administration.

Not scale in terms of your company scaling. Only scale in terms of number of companies using the same off the shelf tooling.

The difference with those tools is that they were off the rack and not bespoke. There were plenty of bespoke systems before, used in fewer places because bespoke systems are expensive.

That tends to happen when your IT team is a cost center, they had no resources on standby.

Now you pay AWS anywhere from 5-11x more for an instance, but you still have an ops team managing it (by some name).

If you had given even 20% of that investment to the sysadmins you would have had an equivalent system.

AWS just weaponised this short-sighted thinking that was killing ops teams.

But if AWS originates from the ops teams of Amazon, then perhaps they were just doing Ops better than everyone else. They chose not to be just a cost centre, and find ways to become better.

That’s certainly an opinion.

From what I recall it was AWS developers trying to solve object storage, and EC2 came later. Not about ops.

Perhaps they would’ve spent more effort making software not suck if they still had that constraint. Instead, now we get the modern dumpster fire because more resources are an HPA call away.

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