DevOps is when the IT forces you to download Citrix on your Mac to login to a Windows VM where portable Putty is copied to the Desktop and the password login to your requested headless Ubuntu VM is in a text file on the mounted network drive.

Ehhhh, no. DevOps is CI/CD. It's being asked to deal with that kinda shitty setup so you automate everything so you don't have to.

@atheist From time to time we need new machines that have network access to specific partners. Unfortunately, a decision was made that it‘s my job to properly setup the machines. True, most of the process is automated and 90% of the task is „just“ installing kubernetes and joining the control plane but our partners require a bit of customization that must be done on the machines and requires data that we are not allowed to share.

@progmem let me introduce you to my (slightly hated) friend, ansible. But even then, that's more sys admin than DevOps.

@atheist Yeah, but the most of the time the machines are not run and maintained by our own IT department. Instead, when we do a rollout at a partners facility, a hard requirement is that the machine is run from inside our partners facility (due to data privacy regulations in the medical sector). When it comes to the initial setup, automation is far from possible (if they don‘t play along).

I'm in the medical sector with (I'm guessing) the same requirements, although we manage our own infrastructure. You should be able to connect to the machine over ssh (you may require mfa depending on contract, but for the initial install, that's probably one of the things you set up). Once you're on the network, you can use ansible over ssh.

That's actually DevOops

@atheist Yes and my post was about this exact problem. We didn‘t get direct ssh access. No, we got a Windows VM to login to and use putty on this VM to connect from it to the machine in question via ssh and a password based login.
I guess the IT guys there didn‘t want to allow access to the Ubuntu Server from outside of their internal network. Dedicated jump server and key based login are just not enough.