
No I won’t tell you what DevOps is. Tell me what you want to achieve instead - wallflower
https://blog.chef.io/2016/09/16/no-i-wont-tell-you-what-devops-is/
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reitanqild
Seems to be mostly hust a link to [https://data-economy.com/no-i-wont-tell-
devops-tell-want-ach...](https://data-economy.com/no-i-wont-tell-devops-tell-
want-achieve-instead-2/)

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existencebox
Multiple people in this thread have asked "what is devops pragmatically." I
will both try and answer why there is no clear answer to that, and what my
clear answer would be.

1\. Everyone has their own definition largely because everyone takes the bits
of what they've heard of devops that they think are beneficial to them. I
don't even think this is necessarily a bad thing (chose right tools for the
job/culture, etc) but it certainly makes it difficult to centralize on a
definition, compounded by...

2\. That many of the people who want it only know, as sister posts have
suggested and what the OP describes, what they want it to achieve, but don't
necessarily have a clear roadmap to getting there beyond "devops".

3\. So from that, what is my "pragmatic" definition (e.g. my "what happens in
the real world" definition); pessimistically, "devs are now responsible for
ops/sysadmin work as well, including on call, infrastructure and telemetry,
but without any additional training, purview, or increase in pay."

Now, to make that criticism, I should propose a better definition; and this
was hinted at by sister posts as well: "Give devs the tools, expertise, and
purview to accomplish ops tasks that previously were thrown over the wall.
This does not mean GETTING RID OF ops domain experts, but unifying them with
your devs to remove unnecessary separation, facilitate communication and needs
fitting, and share expertise and skillsets where appropriate, since there are
many ops tasks that benefit from a more engineering bent, and MANY eng tasks
that benefit from an ops "I need to be able to run this understand it and fix
it" mindset going in, as a first class citizen, rather than as an
afterthought."

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imroot
I'm a big fan of DevOps; for one reason or another, I've been in this 'space,'
if you will long before it was DevOps...since about 2004/2005\. If you ask me
what DevOps is, this is the answer that I will always give:

It empowers the developers and developer teams to get up to speed quickly when
writing new software, or when they add new team members to their teams, It
streamlines and optimizes the delivery of software within the service
lifecycle, and It changes and improves the relationships between development
teams and IT operations by advocating better communication and collaboration
between the two business units.

When done correctly, DevOps can help developers write better code, push to
production faster, and be agile in their iterations and respond to the needs
of both external as well as internal customers quicker.

~~~
tzs
> If you ask me what DevOps is, this is the answer that I will always give.

Nothing in your answer says what it is. It just tells things that doing/using
it will allegedly accomplish/enable. Is anything that accomplishes all of
those things considered to be "DevOps"?

~~~
AznHisoka
It's the processes, and tools that enable those things to be done.

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devonkim
Unfortunately, while the assertion is probably true to not talk about jargon,
there needs to be a starting point of conversation somewhere. Here, it's
probably easier to define what devops definitely isn't and cut away irrelevant
things than by talking about what anyone's jargon defines it as. This is
similar to the whole "cloud" definition but only even more vague than that.

Be very wary of anyone that has trouble distinguishing "devops" from system
administration with modernized toolsets, especially if they aren't talking
about deploying in-house software. Those are the kinds of organizations that
are so far behind technology curves they'll drag you down as a vendor,
contractor, or employee trying to support them if you don't hold them at arm's
length. Because if you're not competent at basic system administration, I
doubt spending money on any form of "devops" by any definition will be useful
- think of the "you must be this tall to use microservices" concept.

The worst is if there's something about culture that's the fundamental goal,
the larger the company the more clients seem interested in essentially under-
market-rate management consulting by using engineers than MBAs. These also
tend to be the same companies that seem to incessantly talk about "it's hard
to turn around an aircraft carrier" and have probably discouraged and
disengaged employees enough that any form of bottom-up culture change is
hampered before it can take off.

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nicolashahn
DevOps to engineers is the pit crew to the Formula 1 driver.

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rospaya
Can anyone answer what DevOps actually is? Like in practice? Every single
definition I saw is just buzzwords, and inconsistent at that.

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tzs
> By Justin Arbuckle

...

> Data Economy published an editorial by our own Justin Arbuckle

...

> Justin urges us all to move past buzzwords

...

> As Justin

...

> Author Justin Arbuckle

Is tzs the only one who finds writing about oneself in third person a bit odd?

