
Ask HN: How do you define DevOps and is it dead? - zabana
I keep reading about AWS killing the DevOps profession and was wondering what were your thoughts on the matter ? Is DevOps dying as a profession ?
======
jMyles
It's a good time to step back and define (or re-evaluate the definition of)
"DevOps." It's an interesting word for an interesting movement, but (I think
sadly) it has come to mean just "Ops."

"DevOps" is a teamwork style and process pattern, wherein the same people
engineering the logic of a system also support each other in taking ownership
over the execution of the logic and maintenance of the system.

DevOps means that, instead of sending an impatient email to the "DB admin" to
apply your migrations, that you invite her to become familiar with the reason
the migration was needed in the first place. In turn, she extends her
toolchain to empower you to apply the migration yourself. Soon, you are part
of the same team and the line dividing you, stopping you from supporting each
other, is gone.

DevOps is good for people who like to always be learning; it can be difficult
for people who like to ever more deeply specialize.

One thing that seems clear to me: the rise of packaged and automated ops
solutions is not a threat to DevOps; on the contrary, it makes it even easier
for a "Dev" team to collaborate on and take ownership of the "Ops" of an
organization.

~~~
mholmes680
>>DevOps is good for people who like to always be learning; it can be
difficult for people who like to ever more deeply specialize.

I agree with this, but I wonder if its because people right now are just still
trying to figure out the tech. We're in the beginning of the adoption curve,
so to speak and specialties will come eventually.

As an additional point, I see DevOps expanding to DevSecOps, DevTestOps, and
when the marketing folks catch up I'm sure we'll soon see DevSecTestOps. These
are all just fancy words for being a more complete Developer - and enabling
Developers to deliver faster.

Anecdotally... From where I'm sitting right now (devops IT, huge non-tech
company), it hasn't actually solved the problem of dumping crap over the wall,
because ultimately people balk when going to prod with changes.
(Compliance/SOX, fear of change, gui based existing deployments, bad APIs,
etc....)

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>These are all just fancy words for being a more complete Developer - and
enabling Developers to deliver faster.

So would I get paid more for being good at all of these areas? Or is this a
move to open up a bunch of positions for mediocre people? (no offense, I am
mediocre at code)

Because DevOps fans seem to be advocating for more responsibility for
similar/less pay (and you're outright fucking yourselves if you take on-call
often without compensation).

If DevOps moves anything like software does, there will be industry leaders
which cause a lot of followers (90%) to hamfist the 10%'s methods onto their
weird deployment/lifecycle processes and it will be an ongoing mutant until
some other new thing promises to bring the light.

~~~
mholmes680
With all due respect, _you_ are responsible for how much you get paid. If it
behooves you to stay current with trends, capitalize on them, identify bogus
ones, then go for it. If you know of a better way, the ball is in your court.

I think a side-effect of devops is that more developers have to be good at
more things, and less excellent at one. But, if I'm a hiring manager, there's
places for both of those profiles in my team.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>With all due respect, you are responsible for how much you get paid.

That's fine, but if I'm maximizing my pay for the effort spent, I'm just going
to screw companies as hard as I can by charging them a ton of money while
doing very little for them as a contractor. As much as you'd think the market
would remove people like this from the industry, it isn't happening.

I could join up as a fulltime employee for 6 months only to find out they
don't _actually_ want to change anything (despite lying to my face in the
interview) and increase value because they're a shitty non-profit, which means
I won't get rewarded for putting ideas forth. WHERE IS MY RECOURSE FOR WASTING
6 MONTHS OF MY LIFE?!

~~~
mholmes680
I've been percolating on this for a day or so now... because your responses on
threads are generally abrasive, but i feel like most people actually feel this
way and you just convey it abrasively. I think you should reframe anything
from "wasting" to "learning from". You can have a lot to take away from even a
bad situation, like:

a. Learning how to detect BS in interviews. Interviews are two-way streets.

b. Sit down and figure out what you really do want and how you ended up in
this situation so it doesn't happen again.

c. 6 months over a career is nothing, and again, it wasn't wasted, its just
the way you're looking at it.

d. Have you networked at all in these six months? If so, not wasted. If not,
well that can only be on you not the company, right?

e. If you think non-profits are shitty, maybe a) they're not for you; b) you
don't understand non-profits; and/or c) what were you doing there in the first
place.

f. "screwing" a company is the same thing as looking out for your own needs
(or in this case, the contractor's). There's good and bad contractors, of
course.

Your observations may not necessarily be wrong, but to say it was a waste of
time is short-sighted.

(edit: formatting)

------
randallsquared
DevOps is just the mixing of system administration and software development.

My company has a single team that handles all the technical matters, from cert
and domain registration to database and system administration to CSS tweaks on
the website. We're a devops team. It isn't necessarily the case that each and
every member of the team is conversant with all the technologies involved, but
each member is ready to co-pilot and pick up those tasks if necessary.

A devops engineer, similarly, is one that is conversant with many of these
technologies themselves, and is competent to be at least a stand-in sysadmin,
dba, developer, or whatever.

I don't think devops is dying; a company with <10 technical employees probably
needs almost every one to be devops; there just aren't enough people to silo
some of them away. As a technical organization grows, more and more of the
hires can be narrowly specialized, _and should be_ , because devops hires are
often going to be more expensive and less effective at any one narrow
specialization.

AWS is just one of the tools in the toolkit of a devops engineer.

[edit for grammar]

------
holmb
I have read in exactly one place that "devops is dying" \-- admittedly I have
not read everything or even researched the subject -- and that was in the HN
article about AWS CodeStar. I thought to myself at that time that they
couldn't be more wrong. Just because you lift the bar a little higher for what
is automated in the tools you use now you just don't remove the need for
further automation and especially integration between services.

Any worry that devops is going away, regardless which standpoint you have, I
think is unfounded. I might have to change my opinion in the next 5 years or
so but for now I am quite confident the devops way is firmly not dying.

------
TurboHaskal
Not dead at all and definitely not killed by AWS.

My experience after a few interviews is that DevOps in 2017 seems to be a
keyword for "can implement Jenkins Pipelines and has experience with AWS".

Add "will sell free time for cheap" and you get yourself a SRE.

~~~
__coaxialcabal
How would you describe the difference between an engineer with a
specialization or specific expertise in "DevOps" and a "SRE"?

------
azurelogic
As a "DevOps Engineer" at a growing AWS-focused consultancy, I can say that
DevOps is not dead, and AWS is not killing it. AWS is our toolbox. We use it
to design, build, and deploy powerful, cost effective, and scalable solutions
to our clients' problems. I know that sounds like a line of marketing BS, but
that's our real focus. Along the way, we'll automate everything that makes
sense in the process, especially deployment and scaling. So, maybe our
definition of DevOps wider or more holistic than how most of the industry
defines it. Either way, AWS is not automatic, and automating/orchestrating ALL
of its parts still requires some human smarts.

------
CrLf
Devops was never a profession. But I think it's dead anyway.

The problem devops intended to solve was the lack of proper communication and
mutual understanding between developers and systems administrators. It has
failed to solve this problem and, by the current definition, is getting
farther and farther away from doing so.

Two main reasons contribute to this conclusion:

1\. For startups, trying to make due with the least number of people possible,
the term has been taken to mean you need no systems administrators whatsoever.
This is no different than startups have always done - have developers do
everything - but now it's disguised as a good practice.

2\. Developers and system administrators have different goals. These need not
be opposing, but having people wearing two hats means sacrificing one goal for
the other. Usually, reliability and long term maintainability suffers as
developers (as a profession) are much more vulnerable to hype.

Where startups are concerned, this may be irrelevant, as most go bust before
this becomes a (culture) problem.

But for established organizations, this can lead to disaster. Every
organization needs people that _care_ about staying ahead of the curve and
people that _care_ about keeping the service at its highest levels of
reliability (=quality). Both kinds of people must participate in the process
from the start, as peers, and keep each other in check. This is (should be)
devops.

PS: In the corporate scene devops is also dead, but because it now means
"systems administrator" with no change in mentality, just to be cool.

------
Lazare
Dev = write code

Ops = run servers

DevOps = write code and run servers

> I keep reading about AWS killing the DevOps profession

The articles I read are actually about AWS killing _ops_ in favour of more
devops, because apparently AWS makes ops so easy your devs can do it during
their lunch breaks.

The technical term for this idea is "nonsense".

> Is DevOps dying as a profession ?

No, but it isn't much of a profession. Large complicated systems will need
both teams of devs _and_ ops. Simple ones can work fine with overlap. Good
tools can (very slightly) decrease the need for ops and increase the need for
devops I suppose.

A better question might be: "Is devops dying as a buzzword?"

To which I can only reply "I hope so, because it confuses more than it
enlightens."

~~~
zer00eyz
> The articles I read are actually about AWS killing ops in favour of more
> devops, because apparently AWS makes ops so easy your devs can do it during
> their lunch breaks.

Nonsense is an understatement...

We, as technologists spent YEARS getting ourselves into some sort of sane
silo's because the tools in each area were becoming more complex. Operations,
Database, Backend, Front end, and arguably now mobile as different roles.

In many places that meant building walls and silo's that were hard to bypass
(for good reason) but it made getting problems fixed exceedingly difficult,
especially where the rubber met the road (code running on servers).

The desire to have open communications isn't the desire to eliminate jobs or
roles, but a desire to make actually solving the problems of running an
application, doing good engineering easier. This was the intent of Dev-ops
collaboration, and doing it out in the open as partners!

The problem is that business have taken this and run with it as a reason to
curtail resources. Lets take another example that hacker news likes to talk
about, Agile. I can't tell you how many agile coaches advocate for everyone on
an engineering team being able to accomplish ever role. Not only is this naive
but is potentially a source for pain further down the road.

I had to think about why Agile coaches were advocating this, and the
conclusion that I came to was that "business" likes it. Dev-Ops is now code
for "full stack", now code for "we expect you to do everything"... It doesn't
scale and further down the road creates far more problems than it solves.

------
dstaheli
I like Donovan Brown's definition of DevOps:

[http://donovanbrown.com/post/what-is-
devops](http://donovanbrown.com/post/what-is-devops)

"DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous
delivery of value to our end users."

"I am very deliberate in the terms used in this definition. I choose value
over software. DevOps is not just automating a pipeline so we can quickly
deliver software. Our goal is to deliver value. The term end users was also
very carefully chosen. The value we produce must reach our end users. If the
value only reaches the Dev and QA environments but is held up before reaching
production where it can be realized by our end users, we are still failing."

"It is very important to realize that DevOps is not a product. You cannot buy
DevOps and install it. DevOps is not just automation or infrastructure as
code. DevOps is people following a process enabled by products to deliver
value to our end users."

~~~
ehosca
The issue that I have with that definition that it suffers from
abstractionitis...

Just try replacing DevOps with just about any computing paradigm that entered
the market in the last 5 years and hopefully you'll see what I mean. Care
should be exercised to separate marketing out of product definitions. Focus on
concrete, measurable improvements the product brings to the table rather than
producing statements that are generally agreeable.

I'm also slightly peeved by use of the phrase "delivery of value" -so broad,
so sterile, its almost as if its chosen as a result of a search for the least
objectionable phrase. I think it smells of intellectual laziness to use terms
that we don't care to define and conveniently enough punt to the almighty end
user.

------
d--b
DevOps is the realization that the running of a software platform is a complex
task, and so:

1\. Operational matters such as platform upgrade, platform failure, platform
testing, and so on should be incorporated in the general design process.

2\. Engineers should be onboard in the day to day monitoring of the platform.

It shouldn't come as a big surprise because it is something that is well
understood in other engineering disciplines, but somehow in IT, the
development team can be fairly remote to actual operations. For instance, when
you outsource the design / construction of an application, it doesn't usually
come with running the actual thing, or even the necessary training for
supporting the application.

------
coolkil
I see dev-ops as a way a company has shaped its delivery process. This means a
devops profession does not exist. In short it means that a developer has
direct contact with an operator and tester or viceversa. Dev-ops focusses on
short direct comunication which has nothing to do with technology or platform
(like AWS Cloud, Azure or Google Cloud)

However technology can be used to enhance the devops delivery process. Tools
like Puppet, Chef, Docker/Kubernetes can have a positive effect.

To give an answer to your question: no devops is not dead. It is a way to
work.

~~~
kreetx
This is what I was going to say: is a way to work. Taken to the extreme, it's
where the developers themselves deploy.

The pipeline for this needs to exist though, so one might say that the
profession of an operations engineer is changing from someone who gets the
code and deploys into someone who sets up the pipeline and keeps it going.

------
geofft
First, "the DevOps profession" is one of two major uses of the term "DevOps,"
and, in my opinion, an erroneous one. But words are defined by how they're
used, so we have to deal with this.

You can see "DevOps" as a mindset, that developers should understand how to
operationalize their code and ops staff should understand how to write and
debug the code they're maintaining. That is the original idea: there used to
be a lot of resistance to the idea that devs should care about deployment or
that ops folks should be expected to program.

You can also see "DevOps" as a role, meaning sysadmins who know how to code.
That's largely becoming less of a role, I hope, due to some combination of
_all_ sysadmins being expected to code (except in non-best-practices
environments like large banks or small startups with opinionated people), and
"DevOps" in the previous sense becoming more successful. AWS is certainly part
of it, because it makes it more possible for someone with a developer skillset
to deploy a working app, but devs have been pinch-hitting as ops for decades
and it hasn't killed the ops profession.

That said, knowing software engineering doesn't imply a knowledge of AWS, and
it certainly doesn't imply a knowledge of how to evaluate tradeoffs in AWS -
should you make the code more complex to span AZs? Should you deploy cool
software on EC2 boxes or use AWS's managed infrastructure? Should you store
certain data in S3 or in a normal filesystem? If it's in S3, should you make
it directly accessible or proxy it through your app? etc. That will continue
to be a skillset, and there will always be times when "install normal software
in EC2" will be the right answer and therefore necessitate the entire old-
school ops skillset. And for many industries, there will also be times when
"actually, don't put this in the cloud" is the right answer, too. So from that
perspective, I would certainly not say that AWS is killing the ops profession,
whether you call it "ops" or "DevOps". Of course your ability to properly
terminate a SCSI bus is no longer of much value, but that's true whether or
not AWS is around.

------
justinhj
AWS doesn't do everything for you and probably never will because people have
different needs.

What is dying is the more manual side of ops. Ops guys that aren't comfortable
writing a bit of code are in danger of falling behind.

~~~
memracom
And that is why there is such a proliferation of AWS services. They are
designed for customers who share a certain set of needs. If you do not fit
into the target set of a service then you should not use that service at all.

Deciding which services on AWS to use begins by understanding the needs of
your business, and then looking for good fit within the set of AWS services.
Also, AWS is no longer the only game in town. For some companies, Oracle Cloud
better fits their ways of working. For others, Google has better services. Or
Rackspace. AWS is no magic bullet, just a very useful toolkit that can help
you a lot, IFF you understand it.

------
kennu
From my perspective, a devops person (in the context of AWS) is someone who,
in addition to coding, knows how to monitor and configure all the AWS
services. E.g. they know how to provision right amount of DynamoDB capacity
for the application, setup CloudWatch alarms and so on. Every individual
developer might not know all that stuff, especially if the company is just
starting to migrate to the cloud. Also, specific devops people might need to
be named as responsible for responding to alarms.

------
dsr_
There is no DevOps profession. There are people who work in computers, and
they specialize in various ways.

People who are specialized in databases are called DBAs. Not every company
needs a DBA, but many find it useful to have a few on staff, and some need
many.

People who are specialized in networking are called network engineers. Not
every company needs one; some need many.

People who are specialists in application development are often called
software engineers. Most companies need one; some need many.

This list of specializations goes on and on, and changes over time.

"DevOps" means using the tools and methods of modern software engineering to
conduct systems administration and configuration of systems and networks. In
other words, it's how sysadmins now operate.

Does your company need one or more operations specialists? Maybe. Maybe not.
You're still going to have at least a minimum amount of work to do in that
area, and the modern methods for that are called DevOps.

Your business needs should drive your hiring. Is your business plan to eke out
a margin between the costs of AWS and the revenue of Google Ads? Then you need
someone skilled in DevOps to help you understand performance, latency, and how
to scale up and down quickly to lose the least amount of money.

Is your business plan to sell people subscriptions to a service which is not
bursty and is reasonably predictable? You will want DevOps skills to manage
the fleet of machines that will be the most cost-efficient way to provide
that.

~~~
geocar
> In other words, it's how sysadmins now operate.

There are a lot of sysadmins that _don 't_ operate this way. I see a lot of
them at banks.

> "DevOps" means using the tools and methods of modern software engineering to
> conduct systems administration and configuration of systems and networks.

Does it have to be limited to systems administration and network
configuration? If we define "DevOps" as an approach that develops software in
response to operational tasks, then we allow other kinds of operations, like
handling check-in and check-out of books from a library. In this way, anyone
who has ever optimized themselves away is in DevOps.

I'm reminded of a very complicated program that compiled 32-bit powers of pi
efficiently, which was replaced with a table of 19 integers by a clever junior
developer, only to have it reverted by the senior developer in case the
constant in question needed to be changed in the future.

Maybe "DevOps" is simply operators who can program, but then maybe everyone
should be able to program.

~~~
dsr_
> There are a lot of sysadmins that don't operate this way. I see a lot of
> them at banks.

Let's put it this way: the more educated and effective a sysadmin becomes, the
more they appreciate programming their way out of their problems rather than
doing things one-off.

> Does it have to be limited to systems administration and network
> configuration?

Indeed, my point is that the universe of jobs in computing is a continuous
lumpy spectrum, not a set of rigid silos.

If management wants it to be a set of rigid silos, they are losing efficiency
in exchange for what they perceive to be control.

~~~
geocar
> Let's put it this way: the more educated and effective a sysadmin becomes,
> the more they appreciate programming their way out of their problems rather
> than doing things one-off.

I'd agree with that.

I watched a (very) experienced sysadmin struggle to edit some JSON today. He
had several notepads with JSON that he would copy and paste into various
screens. I suspect when he gets a flat tire, he changes each one to see which
one is flat.

> If management wants it to be a set of rigid silos, they are losing
> efficiency in exchange for what they perceive to be control.

I think (this kind of) management doesn't know better, but natural selection
doesn't move swiftly enough.

Is there something we can do about that?

------
memracom
To me DevOps means a shift of the traditional responsibilities of System
Administrators to Software Engineers. Either Software Engineers take on all
those responsibilities replacing Sysadmins or Sysadmins become programmers in
order to be able to design and implement software which does what they used to
do.

The point is that the Designer of the Software, now has full responsibility
right through deployment and continuing while the software operates in
production. This means that you can no longer fob off these responsibilities
on other people and say that you are "just" a full-stack developer. It means
that you must understand how your code makes use of computer hardware and
virtualization systems, and design something that can reliably and smoothly be
deployed into production (changes) and operated ongoing (monitoring, health
boosts, etc).

AWS is just one of the ways in which code can be used to provision hardware
and deploy code.

Google has a role called SRE which is really the heart of DevOps. They HAVE TO
do this due to scale, but even smaller organizations should learn from Google
SRE best practices because this is the future of ALL computing.

In fact, it is already at the point where software engineers who have never
handled hardware (IOT, Raspberry Pi, Micro:Bit) are obsolete even if you are
just graduating from college in June.

Multicore CPUs with multiple cache levels, shared RAM, control over which
cores are active and how fast they run. GPUs. The Von Neuman model of a
computer is long past.

Today there is a new definition of computer. It is a network of processing
units, storage units, and communication links which can be made to work
together to do useful work.

Note that this definition includes a single 4-core Intel i7 chip, and all of
AWS. Distributed computing is no longer something that happens between your
computers, it also happens inside them.

------
nailer
> AWS killing the DevOps profession

Hell no. If you're in DevOps and use AWS, that means you need to know the AWS
API.

~~~
mrweasel
I never really understood why AWS, Azure and similar would mean that DevOps
(or operations alone) would go away. Sure if you pure lambdas and S3, then
yes, maybe, but that's really not sufficient for most business.

Heroku style solutions could perhaps eliminate the need for operations, but
that still seems pretty niche.

~~~
problems
> Heroku style solutions could perhaps eliminate the need for operations, but
> that still seems pretty niche.

That's sort of the direction that AWS has been aiming lately with some of
their newer releases.

For a variety of reasons, from security and privacy to cost analysis to
performance I don't see pure ops or devops anywhere near vanishing though.

------
lothiraldan
For me, DevOps is mostly about communication and efficiency. It's for me very
similar to Agility and Lean movements as they try to reduce the time between
the birth an idea and the moment it is available for the customers.

DevOps is mostly about optimizing the interaction between Developers teams and
Operations teams but the general principles can be applied across the company.

I think we focus too much on the "How" or "What", while we should ask
ourselves "Why", Why do we do DevOps and why do we need DevOps, it's a
reflexion I tried to share in these slides:
[https://speakerdeck.com/lothiraldan/the-importance-of-why-
in...](https://speakerdeck.com/lothiraldan/the-importance-of-why-in-devops-
community)

------
gwbas1c
When I was involved in a "DevOps" role it became difficult because the part of
the product that I spent the most time in was a complicated fat client that
used the servers. The other engineers gravitated towards improving the
servers.

The reason why it became difficult was because on a random Saturday afternoon
I'd get pulled into diagnosing a mysterious database warning. Even though I'm
quite familiar with database development, when it's a system that I don't work
with on a day-to-day basis; I just don't know what to do when the fire alarm
goes off.

In contrast, the engineers who worked on the server never got pulled into
client-side fires.

The problem quickly resolved itself when we fired our head of engineering.

------
AznHisoka
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=devops](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=devops)

i think its safe to say its not dead

------
maxxxxx
I would love to have devops in my company. We either have to deal with IT who
lacks even the most basic understanding of what developers need or the
developers have to set up tools on the side which leads to badly run systems
because nobody has time. It would be great to have a few people who can focus
on setting up systems and keeping them running. It makes no difference if this
on AWS or somewhere else. Integrating different tools requires a lot of
skills.

------
mr_tristan
DevOps to me was always just "software development for operations". Sysadmins
always did some form of it, but in some cases you want someone just focused on
a larger software solution and not really chasing down the latest request.

Not sure how AWS is necessarily killing anything, since the wheels of
automation roll forward. Instead of "deploy this app" and "migrate this
schema" we have "setup my continuous delivery environment".

------
PretzelFisch
I thought devops was sysadmins that wrote code to maintain and monitor
servers. As well as deploy product "packages" to the test/production
environments. Therefore it's death is from cloud providers like AWS build
tools into their cloud offering that make this need disappear. Maybe this is
just from working with SAS 70 compliant companies where there needs to be a
clear divide between product development and operations?

------
gargravarr
"It broke, fix it!!"

This is how DevOps is defined where I work (I'm on the recently formed team).
'It' is, of course, arbitrary (we're responsible for every old piece of cr*p
that nobody else wants), and the 'fix' is always a band-aid slapped across it
to keep it working until its undefined retirement date.

Most of our work week is like this >_>

~~~
mrweasel
I had a job where if something required electricity it was ITs problem.
Computers, coffee makers, standing desk, lamps... it's all IT apparently.

~~~
paulolc
It's called IoT... @InternetOfShit ;)

------
polotics
"DevOps" is a hype-word now, so yes in some places it is dead. The need to get
flexibility and share skills remains.

------
hd4
To me, it means the empowerment of a solo developer through (intelligent) use
of modern methods, hardware and software tools to achieve that which required
a team of about 10-20 in the past.

In other words, the distillation of the last 50 years of computer science to
get a job done faster and better.

------
psyc
I hope it isn't dead, because I certainly don't want to do it. AWS doesn't
manage itself.

------
ingmarheinrich
"Devops get stuff to run, Ops keeps stuff running". Following this definition,
we'll always need Devops. When using AWS, there's no need for the old school
"Ops", however, having SRE is a good thing. AWS + Devops + SRE = Profit.

~~~
tapoxi
I don't get why "ops" needs to be a separate group from "devops". Surely if
ops is running the environment, they know best about how to tweak it?

------
Clubber
From what I understand, DevOps is when a single person or team is responsible
for developing the software; standing up , configuring and maintaining the
instances it runs on. So the person or team is responsible for not only the
software, but everything it takes to run successfully in a production
(dev/qa/etc) environment. It stands to break the wall/barrier between
development, DBA, and NetOps.

It's actually empowered by cloud services which are easier to stand up /
maintain than a local infrastructure. I hope it's not dead, it's super
efficient. It does take a person / team who is willing to learn the nuances of
network / database administration though.

It's nothing new, but it's new to employ at larger organizations which
typically silo development, database admin and NetOps.

------
nunez
to me, devops is about unifying infrastructure "ops" and application
developers. This isn't that difficult for tech startups since they are usually
one in the same, but the idea becomes more pervasive at larger organizations
that siloed these "two" responsibilities.

Based on what I'm seeing, the movement is far from dead. There are MANY large
orgs that stand to gain a lot from adopting this mindset. The biggest issue is
that change is difficult for many people.

By the way, there are companies that siloed their AWS ops teams. AWS alone
isn't an answer.

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SqueeziePig
To me, DevOps is quickly configuring a Google Compute Engine instance with
Python/Go app using (PubSub or RabbitMQ) to communicate Firebase for iOS
application messages, with a DigitalOcean.com and AWS instances. DigitalOcean
will often be used for Postfix Email, which requires DNS (SPF configuration
and filtering).

These are usually quick configurations outside the main development, to
quickly test a new concept, or maybe to troubleshoot an issue. You're using
Python Pandas, TensorFlow, scikit-learn.org to model/prove verify the issue.

I would say the traditional DevOps (if there was one), has expanded... you've
added System Admin, DBA, Developer and a Machine Learning to your toolkit. Of
course, we all have smartphones, so we leverage that too...

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ap46
DevOps gets sidelined as a single skill, part of the whole.

An analogy would be iPod/Music app in the iPhone from the glory days of the
iPods.

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conradfr
My not very technical CTO told me that "all developers will be devops in the
near future", so I guess it's dead.

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holydude
Many developers think that they can integrate systems but it's often the case
they have no idea. DevOPS in my opinion is a person that integrates and
maintains various technical + non-technical systems / parts of the company.

