Extremely stupid question but what exactly is devops

A new word for system admin? By the way, it's 'site reliability engineer' now.

Short version and what most people believe: Automating infrastructure and deployment through scripts, code, hooks and pipelines. Monitoring load and automating scaling up and down based on that is one example.

Long version and "origin": making devs and sysops work together on common goals in the same teams to mutually exchange knowledge, pain points and getting an understanding of what it's like on the other side of the proverbial fence. Working together makes you see the other person as a person, not just a random anonymous speedbump in a beurocratic system.

Ps! Not stupid at all. Its vague and changing...

The same team is developing an app and running it in the cloud

A person who press a button and gets all the credits

@mpie Or no button at all and everything goes on auto :D

The easiest explanation: "dev"ops" means "developer" and "operator" (in the same team/person)

@Sumafu no. Devops is *not* a developer.

Devops is a mindset striving to optimize, automate, script, pipeline everything to make as little room for human error as possible and make things as robust as possible.

The only thing devops is developing are scripts, automation rules, etc. Devops is *not* about developing the main product. It's about a blazing fast, reliable and robust deployment/delivery pipeline. It covers everything in between a git repo and a live customer-facing prod

it is not a sysadmin role. But a sysadmin is desired to develop a devops mindset. It's not a qa role. But qa is desired to develop a devops mindset. And so on and so forth.

@irene you are 100% correct. It cannot. Yet some people catch the buzzword and use it however they want.

I'm surprised I hven't heard of a role 'agile engineer' yet :)

@irene did u mean glory hole

@irene you're still assuming devops is a job title, aren't you? :)

either way - yes and no. Automate whatever can be safely automated -- yes [not "all the things"]. Make himself obsolete - not by a hair of my chinny chin chin. Not all yhe thongs can or should be automated; whatever is automated -- needs maintenance and constant improvements, further development; new things to come could need automation, etc, etc. There's no way a person like that will become obsolete :)

You are in luck! I actually asked this in our scrum master training. DevOps is a developer, but not really like developer, but more like operator. Operator doesn't really operate anything and actually operator is not a developer but more like culture. So we are developers and then there are operators and we are the operators and we are the culture. Or value. Or like community of aggregated busines vision streams.

So in short: it's bullshit.

As someone who is striving to be a devops engineer, I think my two cents are valid here. I wholeheartedly agree that devops is a mindset; one that should be adopted by most people in the code development business. But devops is also a valid position.

I'm starting to sense that 'sysadmin' is being used to generalize anyone who's working on servers. Compared to a developer. You have frontend, backend, web, mobile, game developers and so on. And it's the same thing in the 'sysadmin' space.

So while sysadmin is a term that covers everyone who works with servers, it's the same as using the term developer. There are many things to be done, being under those blanket terms.

Sorry. I'm just so tired of people invalidating devops as a position. You try setting up a workflow with docker, kubernetes, ansible, Jenkins and puppet, and tell me that that is not an entire position, in and of itself.

@irene because it can be so much more than that. I'd like to make it clear, that I know devops is being used as a buzzword by many people right now, where they shouldn't. I'm just saying that the 'devops is not a job. Period.' saying, is just plain wrong. There are nuances to it, as there is to everything

@irene yeah. That's not really an argument against what my point

@irene well that is a matter of different opinions then.

@irene let's agree to disagree. And before you hit with some variation of 'it's a fact', in my opinion, it doesn't need a definition.

@irene okay. Fine.. Here's my (albeit vague) definition of music: when different instruments are used, to create a coherent piece of work.

Would you argue against that definition?

We have a devops department.

Mindset, position... Meh, that's semantics.

They are devs in the sense that they program... But only tooling. They mostly use Golang, Python, Bash and NodeJS in our case.

The point is, an application dev can only learn so much.

We have PHP/VueJs, Rust and Swift/Kotlin devs.

If a PHP developer is stuck because he has to research how Docker works, he's wasting time. If a Kotlin dev is building a component which needs data from an internal API and schedule a job in a Redis queue, he shouldn't have to figure out for long how to talk to those resources.

They ask devops to set up staging environments, and provide them with the right API keys. Devops figures out when new databases are needed, and why there is a mysterious spike in traffic at 3:03am every day. They buy domain names, and configure AWS.

Devops are the infrastructure guardians and the tollbooth operators; they're planning new roads, they schedule migrations at the right times, and most importantly they take all the blame when things go wrong 😂

It's an extremely sophisticated method of separating C level managers from their budgets.

@mpie sure, but where does that button come from? Spawned from the void?

DevOps is neither a simple job, or a specific thing to do. It's a process. DevOps is finding bottlenecks and things that need optimization in your processes, automating and streamlining them as far as it provides benefits. DevOps is building reliable, documented and, most importantly, reproducible processes.
Said processes could be anything from setting up general infrastructure, eg bootstraping network hardware, provisioning VMs, or your general CI/CD pipeline that automatically builds packages and publishes them to your repository.
DevOps is more a way to do things, like an ideology you might say. There's no generally defined point where you become a 'DevOps Engineer', it's more like a description of a vague idea on how to do things. When someone is looking for a person who does 'devops' it's more like asking for a set of abilities, maybe a scripting language or two, maybe experience with a config deployment tool? Maybe he would like someone who knows how to automate things.
DevOps is a huge topic, you could compare it to naming the world's time periods. The world went from the industrial revolution to postmodernity (I skipped a few in-between), IT went from the manual period to the automation period, or DevOps 🤷🏻‍♂️

@Kimmax

All the things you mention are also true for backend or DBA.

When sysadmins went from shoving ram in racks and managing linux users, to logging in on AWS and monitoring kubernetes clusters, the jobtitle changed.

Yeah, it's a bit of a hyped term, and there is not much clarity about what it entails *exactly*, but that same ambiguity exists for boundaries between front-end & design, between backend & DBA, between tester & QA.

When your company has 3 devs, they must be pretty much fullstack devs. Even if one writes Angular, and the other two create a Java/Spring backend.

If you have 30 or 300 devs, it's smarter to let your devs concentrate on what they are really good at. It's good to have peripheral vision, but distractions make you inefficient.

I know how Docker and Kubernetes works, I know how to write VueJS components, but I almost exclusively focus on the edge between Backend code and DBA.

In the same way, Devops CAN truly be a separate profession as well.

Oh btw this is neat infographic:

https://github.com/preciousokwu/...

@bittersweet yeah, as I said, it is what you need it to be