DevOps: From Unicorns to Horses | Hacker News Reader

DevOps: From Unicorns to Horses

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14 pointsmdauber796 comments

So, I think that the article didn't strongly address what DevOps actually means. DevOps has come to mean a position on a team as opposed to an ideology like it is at the Google's of the world.

My team recently wrote a blog post about this: https://medium.com/@mustwin/postops-devops-7e44d2262385

I find it a little strange that your blog post doesn't mention the term "continuous delivery". That's what many of us call what you call "devops". And yes, I and many others consider "devops" one of the key roles in a continuous delivery methodology.

I think we touched on that in "Automated Deployment" -- I don't actually think that continuous delivery is core to the PostOps manifesto, but enabling it is part of the core manifesto. It's all about lowering the opportunity cost for development, and deployment -- whether engineers choose to leverage this is up to them.

I disagree. I think the article speaks rather well about what DevOps is really about. There's actually a great deal of consensus within the community about it's meaning, and Mr. Kim has been a major contributing member for quite some time now. Every DevOpsDays since 2009 has critiqued and reaffirmed the ideals and principles. Have a look at vimeo.com/devopsdays or the wikipedia article for DevOps.

Swapping DevOps for PostOps or NoOps or FooOps doesn't change what it means.

Recruiters and managers starved for multidisciplinary, highly skilled T-shaped staff have started to throw the term around in job descriptions, but misuse of a term doesn't change it's meaning until the majority of its users adopt the evolution.

You're both right, and that's what is holding DevOps back. From a prescriptive view of language, "DevOps" has the meaning that early leaders like Gene Kim gave it: a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement that combines dev and ops teams. From a descriptive view of language, LOTS of people, and not just recruiters, use it to mean a special group of people who are essentially release managers. Is DevOps the union or intersection of dev and ops? It really depends on what you want it to mean. And that is...not useful.

So here's what that actually is: DevOps is super popular with recruiters and managers since the venn diagram of people who care about DevOps tend to be good team players with general yet current competency with very valuable tools and techniques, and they happily pay very well for these people. People who like being paid very well and enjoy working interesting and current problems realize this and thus DevOps is a tag that allows these two groups to find eachother. It absolutely gets misused in job titles for visibility, and we don't care because it usually doesn't mean the company wants a person who knows and does everything (though it certainly happens). It is entirely possible for DevOps to refer to a position, but by the very nature of the contraction, it would be two jobs for one person. Right now we live in a time of sufficient complexity such that in all but the smallest organizations that doesn't make sense, and in those organizations job titles are moot anyways.

In reality, if you look at the history of the term and the current leadership of the development and discussion around DevOps, it still represents the following core areas: 3rd Order Cybernetics, Agile (Infrastructure + Software Development) and Continuous Delivery. I personally believe it's just a simpler way to refer to 3rd Order Cybernetics (3OC will never catch on) and DevOps the term will give way to something that better fits the nature of the movement, but until then, that's what DevOps is. I agree there's a lot of noise and confusion, but that hasn't erased the history, the progress or the true current state.

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