DevOps is dead because it's run by a bunch of ops people who don't know how to do dev and a bunch of dev people who don't know how to do ops. The only tooling problem is that a bunch of companies created "DevOps tools" that then get dictated to use: K8s, terraform, etc. The only way this works is if you build the application to fit within those frameworks. Writing an indexer that is massively parallel and is mainly constrained by CPU/Memory. Instead, you have devs building something that gets thrown over the fence to a devops team that then containerizes it and throw it on K8s. What happens if the application requires lots of IOPS or network bandwidth? K8s doesn't schedule applications that way. "Oh you can customize the scheduler to take that into account". 2 years later, it's still not "customized" because they are ops people who don't know how to code. If you do customize it, the API is going to change in a few months which will break when you upgrade.

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orsorna 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Would you say it's truly dead or that it fails to meet the performance bar you've described?

The reality is that most devs do not consider a holistic picture that includes the infrastructure they will be deploying to. In many cases, it's certainly a skill issue; good devs are hard to find. And to flip the coin, it's hard to find good ops people too.

The reason DevOps continues to linger, however vague a discipline it is, is because it allows the business to differentiate between revenue generating roles and cost center roles. You want your dev resources to prioritize feature work, at the beckon of PMs or upper management, and let your "DevOps" resources to be responsible for actually getting the product deployed.

In essence, it's a ploy to further commoditize engineering roles, because finding unicorns that understand the picture top-to-bottom is difficult (finding /top/ talent is difficult!). In this way, DevOps is well and alive, as a Romero zombie.

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blutoot 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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gmane 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with business critical production environments.

	▲	blutoot 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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pryelluw 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s like saying that in a post-Viagra world there shouldn’t be men who have trouble getting laid.

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blutoot 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't want to get too deep into your analogy. I was addressing the "DevOps cannot code" part. To me it is a leadership failure if a DevOps team is still afraid of tackling bigger challenges (like the example given by the OP). That, of course, depends on whether DevOps teams will exist in the long run.

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prmoustache 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The very fact that we are talking about "DevOps" teams (that do not include dev) is wrong from the very start.

DevOps is a methodology, not a role.

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blutoot 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've always felt that DevOps became a function/team partly because companies and especially SWE's started complaining that they were spending too much time "doing Ops work" and product/business started demanding more features for which they running out of cycles. And add to that the burnout from being on-call (especially if the dev team is relatively small and you have to go on-call every 2-3 weekends).

	▲	verdverm 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When I still did on call ops, devs got notified before us if their apps were the problem. We got notified first if it was our infra Having an ops team does not mean devs get to through on call team over the wall to someone else. That's a sure recipe for resentment and turnover

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For most HR departments it is a role, it even has a career path.

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verdverm 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the "DevOps cannot code" part. To me it is a leadership failure

Have you done devops yourself? It sounds like a resounding No. Like you complained ops doesn't like to code (not a core skill for the job), ops complains that devs can't understand basic concepts of how their software runs. Is this also a failure of leadership? Is everyone supposed to know parts of everyone else's jobs?

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BanAntiVaxxers 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are not very many ops people who cannot code. Especially these days. I spent at least the last 20 years doing ops. Ops people are HIGHLY motivated to create things that DON’T FAIL. However, ops teams are often blocked by MANAGERS from doing essentially development in the prod environment. I’m talking about tools and scripts. At the places I’ve worked with the highest uptime, it was because ops had an unlimited, unfettered free hand.

Remove the handcuffs from your ops team and your reliability will SOAR.

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verdverm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Average ops have never been less capable and adverse to programming than now. The problem is getting worse, not better. I know because I am in ops and one of the few who loves to code and accidentally entered the field

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bigstrat2003 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No way. I have worked in ops for 20 years now; almost everyone knows how to code. Some enjoy it and some don't, but people are capable of it and will do it when needed.

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rcoder 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that any kind of “modern ops” necessarily includes coding, even if there isn’t a ton of Python or Rust being generated as part of the workflow.

Kubernetes deployment configurations and Ansible playbooks are code. PromQL is code. Dockerfiles and cloud-init scripts are code. Terraform HCL is code.

It’s all code I personally hate writing, but that doesn’t make it less valid “software development” than (say) writing React code.

	▲	CaveTech 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		These things are not nearly equivalent. It’s writing code, it’s not software engineering.

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0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But the same is true of devs. Many of them are pretty clueless about coding. It's a whole generation of "bootcamp people" who were designers or bartenders and heard there were more lucrative jobs.

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cindyllm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]