Apparently Devops is not a JobTitle

Devops, Devops, Devops, everybody talks about it but we're still defining it ...

There's so many different interpretations possible for the term Devops , It's automated infrastructure, it's agile infrastucture, it's getting devs and ops closer to eachother, it's briding the gap between devs and ops , it's agile system administration, it's the movement , it's the mindset , it's the spirit.

Lots of people, lots of opinions .. Indeed some people have been doing this kind of work for ages, some claim the cloud is what makes devops become visible (but we've been doing cloud since before the cloud marketeers called it cloud)

Some define the devop as a European based , open source backgrounded , thirtysomething senior sysadmin , or should I say infrastructure architect , originated concept . Others claim it's developers gone sysadmin gone partly developer again ..

But it seems like lots of people claim that Devops is more about the team, not about the unique individual doing a job.

You'll have to agree however that our jobs are significantly different from the system adminstration type jobs you'll find at the average IT department. With that in mind: How shall we call this breed of people cooking up chef stuff, playing the puppeteer or cranking up the CFEngines ?

And no I don't like Devministrator :)

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Comments

Banos's picture

#1 Banos : man-in-the-middle

I'm gonna change my email sig to read devops and see what happens.

I hate labels and job roles, they naturally create division and silos. But its essential. How else does one find a job/contract? Esp when one has to deal with agents in between. I've spent years trying to shoe-horn my experience and erm ... value into something like a CV. But ultimately we have to be understood to move forward in more ways than one.

There are also project teams set up quite often that contain many different specialisations. But this only happens on large expensive projects. Does it help? What do the stats say from industry? Certainly seems too...

B.


Gabriele Bozzi's picture

#2 Gabriele Bozzi : Op-Artists?

Dev-Ops are the renaissance men of IT: they are masters of many disciplines, they have a vision, their archetypes are a balance of rigor and beauty.
Not the beauty that many can perceive on canvas however; for me, for example, is rather something epidermic that makes me feel the pulse of the systems they design.


Adam Jacob's picture

#3 Adam Jacob : We call them...

Systems Administrators and Software Developers, depending on whether they focus primarily on building the application or building the infrastructure that runs it.

The "DevOps" movement is about having everyone understand how the entire system works, and everyone being able to express what their underlying business value is. This has traditionally been very easy for Software Developers - if the business *is* software, their value is obvious. For Systems Administrators it's been harder - is your value that you keep things up? Is it that you keep costs down? As a profession, we've been bad at making it clear. (The answer is that you tie operations to revenue, and you make availability the problem of the entire company, not just systems administrators.)

As for what we call people using Chef, Puppet, and Cfengine, we call them "good at their job". :)