Ask HN: Why “Ops”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why “Ops”?

5 pointsbenatkin7 comments

There seems to be a trend of calling everything "ops". In some tech places DevOps is what used to be called "Ops", and "Ops" now means managing the startup's office, ordering meals, etc. Today I see "TalentOps" [1].

Where this trend is headed? How did it get started? Why was SysAdmin called "ops" in the first place?

1: http://www.meetup.com/The-SF-TalentOps-Meetup/

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"Operations" as opposed to "engineering" for systems admin.

The "DevOps revolution" is predicated around increasing the amount of automation involved with ops, though in my experience that's 1) simply a continuation of long-time best practices and 2) often frustrated by the non-programmable tools employed in some "DevOps" tools (e.g., RightScale, which utterly lacks scriptability).

More on RightScale, FWIW, somewhat dated, though it matches my own experience and impressions:

http://www.codelord.net/2011/07/27/why-i-regret-choosing-rig...

In an IT context, Ops refers to Operations (maintaining the operation of your IT infrastructure). If your infrastructure fails, Service(s) may be impacted (down/unavailable). Operations exists to keep the infrastructure (and resulting Services) alive and operational. A System Administrator (SysAdmin) is one of the roles (of many) in the traditional operations team. I see the traditional operations model evolving as infrastructure itself evolves. DevOps is a new operations methodology with a focus on leveraging development capabilities to simplify and automate traditional operations tasks. For example, identifying that a specific process always dies on a Server when x y and z happens, and in turn, writing a script/program to automatically restart the process when it experiences the defined behavior. Or another example, identifying that a network ACL needs to be modified when a new Server is provisioned, and in turn, writing a script/program to automatically populate the ACL when the Server is provisioned. Regarding TalentOps, seems to be a play on words to me; aka identifying other verticals of your startup staff and referring to it as <whatever>Ops as in "this person is responsible for <whatever> to operate".

Interesting take: "leveraging development capabilities to simplify and automate traditional operations tasks". I think of it as the opposite: leveraging operations discipline to improve development processes. We're talking about identifying bottlenecks in the development pipeline, for example manual testing, and targeting those for automation in order to elevate system throughput. This is the application of Lean manufacturing concepts such as Kanban to software development work.

I guess it's both: development applied to operations, and operations management applied to development.

At some places developers do everything including support and IT now that the cloud has replaced a lot of what IT did. Hence the term devops. Instead of other people dealing with developer mistakes, developers now have to pay with their time. IT people and sysadmins now work on cloud services instead of maintaining things for specific systems.

I would really like for this to be answered.

It sounds more official and serious and makes people feel more important so they title themselves that way.

The field is maturing. People are starting to figure out what Toyota learned sixty years ago and American manufacturers figured out thirty years ago: process matters. Funny thing about the Agile manifesto, if you read it carefully, they wrote in 2001 (?) that "we've discovered from experience that these things work" (I'm paraphrasing) but they do not say "we have theory to explain why these things work". It turns out that ten years later, we're learning that the reason they work is that they either make the process and its problems visible (Scrum, Kanban) or offer techniques to improve the process (Scrum, XP). Beyond software development, Lean concepts (again adapted from manufacturing) are being applied to entrepreneurship. Why wouldn't an entrepreneur who's read The Lean Startup want someone specifically to focus on the "ops" of his process? I admit that I don't think meal ordering processes are likely to be a meaningful bottleneck, but who can say?

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