

Ask HN: Why “Ops”? - benatkin

There seems to be a trend of calling everything &quot;ops&quot;. In some tech places DevOps is what used to be called &quot;Ops&quot;, and &quot;Ops&quot; now means managing the startup&#x27;s office, ordering meals, etc. Today I see &quot;TalentOps&quot; [1].<p>Where this trend is headed? How did it get started? Why was SysAdmin called &quot;ops&quot; in the first place?<p>1: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;The-SF-TalentOps-Meetup&#x2F;
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dredmorbius
"Operations" as opposed to "engineering" for systems admin.

The "DevOps revolution" is predicated around increasing the amount of
automation involved with ops, though in my experience that's 1) simply a
continuation of long-time best practices and 2) often frustrated by the non-
programmable tools employed in some "DevOps" tools (e.g., RightScale, which
utterly lacks scriptability).

More on RightScale, FWIW, somewhat dated, though it matches my own experience
and impressions:

[http://www.codelord.net/2011/07/27/why-i-regret-choosing-
rig...](http://www.codelord.net/2011/07/27/why-i-regret-choosing-rightscale/)

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shawnreilly
In an IT context, Ops refers to Operations (maintaining the operation of your
IT infrastructure). If your infrastructure fails, Service(s) may be impacted
(down/unavailable). Operations exists to keep the infrastructure (and
resulting Services) alive and operational. A System Administrator (SysAdmin)
is one of the roles (of many) in the traditional operations team. I see the
traditional operations model evolving as infrastructure itself evolves. DevOps
is a new operations methodology with a focus on leveraging development
capabilities to simplify and automate traditional operations tasks. For
example, identifying that a specific process always dies on a Server when x y
and z happens, and in turn, writing a script/program to automatically restart
the process when it experiences the defined behavior. Or another example,
identifying that a network ACL needs to be modified when a new Server is
provisioned, and in turn, writing a script/program to automatically populate
the ACL when the Server is provisioned. Regarding TalentOps, seems to be a
play on words to me; aka identifying other verticals of your startup staff and
referring to it as <whatever>Ops as in "this person is responsible for
<whatever> to operate".

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joeclark77
Interesting take: "leveraging development capabilities to simplify and
automate traditional operations tasks". I think of it as the opposite:
leveraging operations discipline to improve development processes. We're
talking about identifying bottlenecks in the development pipeline, for example
manual testing, and targeting those for automation in order to elevate system
throughput. This is the application of Lean manufacturing concepts such as
Kanban to software development work.

I guess it's both: development applied to operations, and operations
management applied to development.

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codeonfire
At some places developers do everything including support and IT now that the
cloud has replaced a lot of what IT did. Hence the term devops. Instead of
other people dealing with developer mistakes, developers now have to pay with
their time. IT people and sysadmins now work on cloud services instead of
maintaining things for specific systems.

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asaddhamani
I would really like for this to be answered.

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mlwarren
It sounds more official and serious and makes people feel more important so
they title themselves that way.

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joeclark77
The field is maturing. People are starting to figure out what Toyota learned
sixty years ago and American manufacturers figured out thirty years ago:
_process matters_. Funny thing about the Agile manifesto, if you read it
carefully, they wrote in 2001 (?) that "we've discovered from experience that
these things work" (I'm paraphrasing) but they do not say "we have theory to
explain _why_ these things work". It turns out that ten years later, we're
learning that the reason they work is that they either make the process and
its problems visible (Scrum, Kanban) or offer techniques to improve the
process (Scrum, XP). Beyond software development, Lean concepts (again adapted
from manufacturing) are being applied to entrepreneurship. Why wouldn't an
entrepreneur who's read _The Lean Startup_ want someone specifically to focus
on the "ops" of his process? I admit that I don't think meal ordering
processes are likely to be a meaningful bottleneck, but who can say?

