

My take on DevOps - benjaminws
http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2010/08/my-take-on-devops/

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wccrawford
Maybe I'm retarded or something, but I can't imagine having a development team
that doesn't interact strongly with operations.

How do you know what software to build? Operations.

Who uses the software and reports bugs and makes suggestions? Operations.

Without Operations, I'd just be sitting here twiddling my thumbs.

Of course, if you are developing software for other companies, you need to
work through the channels, and I could see them not allowing communications
directly with their operations personnel. But if it's the same company and you
can't communicate, shame on everyone.

~~~
gaius
Yeah, the whole DevOps thing is weird - it's like these guys have forgotten
than there was a time when every sysadmin worth his salt was a competent Perl
or Tcl programmer who regularly worked on thousand-line scripts for
automation. We just took it for granted in the 90s that if a sysadmin needed a
tool and didn't have it, he'd make it. One of my former cow-orkers, a dyed in
the wool sysadmin, happily used C++ and Motif.

Maybe the sort of "Redhat certified" sysadmin you get these days can't even
shell-script and they think this is some radical innovation.

~~~
noja
> Maybe the sort of "Redhat certified" sysadmin you get these days can't even
> shell-script and they think this is some radical innovation.

No, sorry. I'm not going to let you get away with that.

Have you ever actually looked at or done any Redhat (sic.) certification? I
have. If you compare it to _any other certification at all_ , you will find
the exams much much tougher. I passed all of them first time, most (RHCE) or
the majority (above RHCE) definitely do not.

I think dragging in Red Hat certification really weakens your argument. What
does being Red Hat certified have to do with knowing how to shell script?
Nothing at all. If you want someone who can shell script,
_ask_them_if_they_can_shell_script_.

It's a simple question, but don't drag down people who've got certifications,
particularly this certification, to make your point.

~~~
gaius
If that is true then why is "DevOps" a new thing? Where is the break in
continuity between the old-school sysadmins who did all this stuff anyway, and
the new-school who think it even needs a special name (and that they've
invented it themselves)?

~~~
benjaminws
It's not really a new thing. It's just a new approach and mentality.

~~~
gaius
It's not new. There was a time, not long ago, where all sysadmins were
"devops".

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gregatragenet
I dono that I agree with the author's definition of DevOps - IMHO it's not
that Dev is talking to Ops, there's nothing new there.

I think DevOps is something more akin to tackling operations problems from a
developer's mindset. 'Infrastructure as Code' is a DevOps mantra.

A developer writes a program, runs the program on a compatible platform, and
expects a certain output.

I think DevOps is - as an Ops guy you write a program, that program runs on a
platform consisting of bare-metal machines, and the expected output is a
platform for your developer's software to run on (i.e. configured & monitored
web/proxy/db servers)

