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.

Comments

put down the sales pitch

[nimbius]

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.