I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article: it's saying that devops was coined by Vogels (i.e. Amazon) as a value add because actual ops people are a necessary evil for a lot of companies that just want the features devs are cranking out to WORK without needing to be managed. Every salary that has to be paid to an ops person is a salary not spent on a dev making new features, fixing important bugs, or doing data engineering, etc. that clients are paying the real money for. Clients don't wanna hear about your deployment problems or DB backups. I'm not saying they are unimportant, but that they're painful cost centers which people looking after the bottom line would love to minimize, i.e. pay Amazon a fraction of what you'd pay full time in house people to do - at least in part. DevOps was meant to give devs more control over this work so that fewer ops people would be needed.
So when there is suddenly a new generation of ops people AGAIN getting paid just to manage stuff instead of build stuff, only now in the cloud instead of on on-site bare metal, this is a BIG misunderstanding of what the intent was.
> pay Amazon a fraction of what you'd pay full time in house people to do - at least in part. DevOps was meant to give devs more control over this work so that fewer ops people would be needed.
And here is the lie in the AWS marketing promise. In reality without ops the infrastructure clueless devs will generate huge AWS bills that move the profits from AWS customers into Amazon's pockets. At the same time with production being more brittle and ci/cd becomming a complex nightmare that gradually takes larger chunks of dev time until things grind to a halt.
The catch 22 being leaking abstractions. In the same way that devs cannot really empower regular users to generate apps with nocode that work well, devops cannot create iaas or paas that can be used without understanding the underlying os, networking, configuration management, package managers, etc
So when there is suddenly a new generation of ops people AGAIN getting paid just to manage stuff instead of build stuff, only now in the cloud instead of on on-site bare metal, this is a BIG misunderstanding of what the intent was.