Slashdot Mirror
Opinion: DevOps Is Dead (techcrunch.com)
Andrey Akselrod, CTO and a co-founder of Smartling, writes for TechCrunch: DevOps, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me, but the age of DevOps is just about over. It's a "Perfect Storm" scenario in some ways. Lots of events coming together that drastically change the status quo. And where it all began was the concept and eventual widespread adoption of agile development and continuous deployment practices. DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground. The premise was to automate the development and deployment tools that require collaborations between both disciplines. But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set. Thus, most companies resolved to create DevOps teams that combined the expertise of both sides to support their developers. The old model of throwing the code over the wall to system administrators who would deploy it stopped working with agile processes and continuous deployment practices. Whose responsibility is it when something goes wrong -- the person deploying the code or the developer? Developers don't know much about deploying and systems administrators don't know much about how the code is supposed to work.
It is now official. TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered DevOps community when TechCrunch confirmed that DevOps market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all positions. Coming on the heels of a recent TechCrunch survey which plainly states that DevOps has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. DevOps is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive job openings test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict DevOps's future. The hand writing is on the wall: DevOps faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for DevOps because DevOps is dying. Things are looking very bad for DevOps. As many of us are already aware, DevOps continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
AgileDevOps is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developer/administrators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AgileDevOps developers Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AgileDevOps is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenDevOps leader Lennart Poettering states that there are 7000 users of OpenDevOps. How many users of SystemDevOps are there? Let's see. The number of OpenDevOps versus SystemDevOps posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SystemDevOps users. DevOps/OS posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of SystemDevOps posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of DevOps/OS. A recent article put AgileDevOps at about 80 percent of the DevOps market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 AgileDevOps users. This is consistent with the number of AgileDevOps Slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of Caldera, abysmal sales and so on, AgileDevOps went out of business and was taken over by SCODevOps who sell another troubled OS. Now SCODevOps is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that DevOps has steadily declined in market share. DevOps is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If DevOps is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. DevOps continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, DevOps is dead.
Respectfully, I've been reading about the death of the site for years. It may well be dying, but I don't think Netcraft has yet confirmed it.