
Ask HN: What does “DevOps” mean to you? - beat
I&#x27;d like to hear your answers! I&#x27;m currently on the job market for DevOps roles, and I&#x27;ve been asked this question multiple times. It&#x27;s not a question with a &quot;right&quot; answer, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like an &quot;opinion&quot; thing, either - it&#x27;s not that being right means someone else is wrong. Rather, it seems to be a question of perspective. Which seems like a good question for the HN community... what are our perspectives on &quot;What is DevOps?&quot;
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beat
OP here, and I'll try to answer this myself.

For me, DevOps is about communication. This is a little different from the
common "DevOps culture" response. How do different people and different teams
communicate for the shared goal of moving software from a developer-facing
world to a customer-facing world?

This generally means "deployment", a handoff of some sorts, and copying the
software from development to production environments. How is this
communicated? How does the producer know what to tell the consumer so the
consumer can deploy to a new environment? How does the consumer communicate
what they need to know?

In more traditional environments, this means meetings and written plans and
tickets. Details are written by humans, for humans. In a "DevOps" environment,
the communication is via automation. The steps to deploy are fully programmed;
only configuration data varies between environments. This way, development and
operations teams are speaking a common, formal language. Vagueness and
interpretation are banished. The plain meaning is there, in the configuration.
The deployment itself becomes configuration! Humans only need to be involved
to provide go/no-go approvals.

Of course, that's not everything. But that's what matters to me. When
development and operations stop communicating with words, and start
communicating with formal, machine-readable configuration, a language free of
opinion and interpretation.

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karmakaze
The key ingredient is a culture of developing for a production operations in
mind. Throwing 'works in dev' code over the wall is its antithesis. This
entails wider-scoped work for ease of operation. The interesting bits for me
is better called OpsDev where development is specifically for automating
operation for improved reliability and performance.

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pauljaworski
Not trying to discourage more discussion here, but I actually recently wrote
an article on this exact topic that I think you'd find helpful:
[https://stackshare.io/posts/experts-explain-what-is-
devops](https://stackshare.io/posts/experts-explain-what-is-devops)

~~~
beat
Thanks! I'm writing about it too, but while writing, I realized it would make
an excellent HN thread.

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bradknowles
I think John Willis is one of the "core four" who helped create the term, and
he has a good writeup at <[https://itrevolution.com/the-convergence-of-
devops/>](https://itrevolution.com/the-convergence-of-devops/>).

Here in Austin, one of the leaders in this space that I follow is Ernest
Mueller, and his writeup is at <[https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-
devops/>](https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/>).

There's a reason why Ernest and crew helped create DevOpsDaysAustin, and
thankfully for us, he's still one of the key figures behind it.

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chefkoch
Just give the devs root in production.

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beat
As Han Solo said, "That's not how the Force works!"

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scruffyherder
Another fad that will be gone leaving little to no meaningful change like all
the other fads before it.

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trelliscoded
It's when my "compiler errors" are system outages.

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itronitron
I think that is called DevOops

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CloudNetworking
Based on what I see out there I've come to learn that DevOps means "sysadmins
with containers".

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itronitron
imho DevOps means setting up, for a development team, the tooling and the
infrastructure they need to create and move their work into product ... it is
specifically not system administration

