devops appops infraops all the ops
Donnie Berkholz wrote a great post about what’s actually happening as Dev vs Ops becomes DevOps [I know I know, keep your groaning to a minimum].
This is a conversation I had frequently at Gartner. People would ask what kind of person they need to hire to do DevOps. I would respond with “Well you already have developers. You have some Unix admins hanging around? Yeah, get them.”
I was once an Irix and Solaris admin. At that time, any good admin was dedicated to automating themselves out of work so they could spend most of the day on IRC, playing games, or reading newsgroups. Automating infrastructure and platforms that get more or less treated like a service by devs was once normal. And now it will be again.
Things don’t go away; the lines just move. Devs own their code through the lifecycle of an application (and it’s constituent services) from dev/test all the way through production and day to day operations. Ops (or IT or platform or whatever) own infrastructure through the lifecycle of an application (and its constituent services) from dev/test all the way through production and day to day operations.
So they have to work together every step of the way. Iterate together. Where exactly the line resides for any given org changes. For example, our "infrastructure" may only go up to the OS image but not all the way up to the runtime. But someone else's could go up to the runtime or not even as far up as the OS image. Regardless of where the line is, we end up having something that’s more like AppOps (AppDevOps!) and InfraOps (InfraDevOps!). InfraOps provides the infra or platform service that the app is built on. AppOps builds and runs the app on that service. They could be the same person, the same team, different people, different teams, generalists or specialists, in-house or outsourced to a cloud provider—it doesn’t really matter.
I don't really care about the terms. Neither should you. As many people point out, we end up back at devs and admins. Took bloody long enough. :)
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P.S.
@aneel@dberkholz What about opsing all the devs?
— Dan Turkenkopf (@dturkenk) May 27, 2014
Yes. That too. :)