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.
"DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground."
I thought the idea was to make developers do system administration and save money. Did I miss something?
Do you have ESP?
Fixed
I don't know if you've noticed, but every single story on Slashdot links to another site. I guess we're doing free advertising on literally every story we post.
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.
I was doing DevOps before it was cool, and now I'm doing it after it's obsolete. Warby Parkers and luxuriant 1800s facial hair should spontaneously appear on my face any second now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground.
devops was invented as a means to staunch bleeding from companies with 50% or better turnover rates due to rushed products, shit management, and poor work-life balance. the idea being if you could get devs and ops to do eachothers jobs youd invent a new third commodity that could become more resillient to 90 hour work weeks and bullshit feature-before-fix code releases. It failed because devs arent great ops, and ops arent great devs.
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.
this process stopped working because of the inclusion of draconian, conflicting, confusing, and often times lip-service change management processes that fit the quarterly management meeting and not much else. CM's gave project and team leaders the sensation of doing something every monday morning when they rubberstamped some code push, but otherwise made life hell when they left for vacation/hangovers. when a code push failed and had to be rolled back, management pushed again to have it rolled forward broken and defied often times their own decrees. In the same breath, theyd crucify you for updating a package or rebooting a server without 15 hours of review and objection from a guy who didnt know TCP from BBQ.
And when I say the cloud, I really mean managed services.
sure, maybe one buzzword killed another but it sure as shit wasnt the latest incarnation of thin clients, hosted services, SAAS, or PAAS, which we now call "Cloud." clouds are just other peoples hardware, so when your devops bullshit went down in flames as a transparent attempt to milk skilled professionals for free overtime and flex-goals, they all quit and submitted their CV's to the cloud. You didnt have to worry about devops for your precious service, but they in turn didnt have to worry about you anymore either unless you skipped a check for the month.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"Developers don't know much about deploying and systems administrators don't know much about how the code is supposed to work."
That's the problem. DevOps was never a solution, but more the term used by companies that were searching for a solution. Lots of studies done, probably lots of consultants got paid - but an actual solution that was better than what people had been doing for years anyway? Never seen one yet...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
DevOps isn't dead. It just smells funny.
But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set.
This is what is killing it. Not the idea that developers have to write deployable, maintainable stuff. Ops needs to plug it in correctly. So lets create a software lifecycle that sits both parties down at the table while the requirements paper is still blank. That's a good idea. What makes it smell like a rotten corpse is the idea that a nice, shiny toolset must be procured to do the job. And consultants tacked big price tags onto their products and shoved them down the CIO's throat.
Have gnu, will travel.
And where it all began was the concept and eventual widespread adoption of agile development and continuous deployment practices.
There's a difference between recognizing the limits of testing and ensuring you can rapidly respond if something doesn't go as expected and reverting is likely to be less successful than fixing forward.... and being unable to plan because you have no idea what you're doing and don't understand system troubleshooting.
But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set.
Yes, this group is called OpsEng.
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.
If you're throwing over the wall, you're doing it wrong. You should be throwing it above or below you in the stack, with each group having a clear demarcation point and expected SLAs to other groups internally, so planning, risk assessment, and performance expectations can be performed appropriately.
Replacing one broken culture with another one doesn't fix anything; and DevOps nowadays usually results in developers trying to code their way around their lack of systems skills more than systems engineers getting to be able to communicate back to devs.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
It's always a good day when a buzzword dies before I ever get the chance to learn what it means.
Not dead, just lying comatose until the next generation of MBAs "invents" it again.
As an operations person by trade, and a developer sometimes by necessity, there is a lot of truth to the idea that a DevOps person is merely someone who used to be called "that System Administrator who codes stuff for us" or a "that poor Developer who has been stuck with the sysadmin tasks and setting up Jenkins"
While buzzwordy, that sort of work might be something that is worth having a name of its own. So I think something that happens to go by the buzzwordy title of "DevOps" is real, but not quite in the way it was being pushed.
I used to joke that DevOps was merely the massive campaign launched by developers who were tired of trying to get Operations to give them root access in Production so they could change things without having to actually fill out a change control and explain to someone who wasn't a developer how to do it. And some of the ideas behind it still sort of smell like that, but that really never became real practice outside of a few types of applications that really lent itself to that sort of pacing.
Instead, I think it has sort of matured into a sort of tools mindset where we are able to use more software defined infrastructure and certain tools to actually break out of the mold of the sysadmin who was first and foremost that guy who was responsible for going to the datacenter and installing Linux or a hypervisor aside from any other tasks. We still need those people, but I think it this is a milepost in the differentiation of admins.
I don't hire "DevOps" people, and while that is the name of a cross-team group where I work, we're still Operations and Development and under different management. And strictly speaking, I always believed that this was how it was supposed to work. If there was anything where DevOps really provided value, it was in the very simple proposition that Ops and Dev should talk to one another and work less like two walled fortresses that occasionally sent heralds between them with formal communications. There is also value in your Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Docker as well, although that could have happened without "DevOps".
But more importantly, as a reference "description", if I tell a recruiter what I need and I was to say a DevOps person, they usually get me exactly who I want. I don't think that usage is dead or dying.
So no, I don't think DevOps is meaningless. It just isn't the "movement" that it started off as and it matured into something slightly different. Perhaps we'll call that something else more descriptive someday and the term can be relegated to the trash heap of history. Until the next buzzword.
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.