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RE: DevOps is DOA

davetst 21st Jan

Take your main argument "DevOps essentially requires everyone involved in the development, deployment, and management of software to change the way they work, to cross-train for multiple functions, and to collaborate with people they???ve all too often viewed as adversaries." and replace the word 'devops' with 'agile'. This is/was the argument against going from waterfall to agile. In the past ops got a 'pass' from having to go agile by arguing increased risks. Devops is the realization that we should have been along for the ride in the first place. I don't think most people in devops are arguing that ops should become programmers and dev should become sys admins, just that both need to come to a better understanding of the other. The cost of adding ops to an agile environment is relatively small when compared to the investment already made to train dev, qa, project/product management and the user.

I'm very excited about advances in paas. I think these tools will be a great addition to the devops toolkit. However they don't signal the end of devops or ops in general. As others have noted, someone still needs to understand the infrastructure behind them and that is not the developer. Just look to the s3 outage last year to understand what happens when developers blindly choose to hit the infrastructure "easy button". They get outages because they didn't understand the infrastructure. Furthermore, the argument for paas is good when you have only a few apps that require 'cookie cutter' configuration. I work in a large enterprise where I have 100+ different apps. Some of them can be lumped together and benefit from a paas but many have specific requirements that can't be met by pushing the small, medium or large button.