DevOps, People and Emotions

2 thoughts on “DevOps, People and Emotions”

1. Hello and thanks for sharing your philosophy, Carlos! This article really caught me (I felt I had to comment; started typing this from my phone). Damn you for making me click that link, Joachim Lindbom 😉
   DevOps certainly has a HUGE potential – I’ve seen it empower a single individual to take charge over an entire value chain – from conceptualization/definition via design and development to cross-platform deployment (across AppStore and Google Play). This guy even manages to support his client base. And make a profit.
   My point is that in some ways this brings back memories of a now distant past; the late 80’s/early 90’s. DTP (i.e. DeskTop Publishing) enabled sigle individuals to take charge over another complex value chain; from idea/story-writing via [digital] photography, graphical design and typography/typesetting to final publishing/distribution. Today we have a very ordinary equivalent for all that; bloggers. And you don’t even have to be particularly good to handle it. If a blogger is somehow able to strike a nerve, he/she can offset even the most acclaimed magazine columnists!
   Back to devOps: Providing your’re skilled enough, you can replace the traditional developer *and* IT administrator, and do away with many hurdles in the process between. But: There’s a tiny but awfully important word in that statement: PROVIDING. Everything is easy when you master the prerequisite skills, but only then. Today I’d consider devOps almost among among a handful of new snake oils, probably about to hit what Gartner refers to as the «peak of inflated expectations» (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Hype-Cycle-General.png). So, please bear in mind that even if you are a capable full stack developers, you are among the few privileged ones. Very many still hang on to the traditional paradigms: Developers code, ITIL folks deploy/run. Perhaps not because they want to, but because their organization isn’t sufficiently aware of/believe in its’ potential. Again, I remember back-in-the-days when we (at the time I was also with Capgemini – or rather CGE&Y) had a number of experts within pretty narrow niches, like Microsoft Exchange (Server v5.5). Nowadays, just about a decade later, almost none of those who were specialists in such fields continue to work on that any more; old black-belt niches are long bygone and now predominately outsourced to some offshore party/remote service provider.
   Now please, don’t get me wrong here – I don’t try to say that I foresee anything like that happening to devOps, but I do expect it to move from something that a fairly limited set of people master (e.g. a mixture of old-school RAD/IDE developer tools PLUS stuff like git, Apache Continuum/Maven Chef/Puppet, Selenium, etc. PLUS a suite of server-side remote management tools) . . . to become mainstream. Just give it a few generations of Xamarin (or similar benches), and a lot of today’s «near-voodoo» will be common, taken for granted. In the mean time we need good guys like you to demystify it all. Keep up the good work! 🙂

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   1. Hello André,
      I wrote this article thinking about those hanging on to the traditional paradigms, just to give them a glimpse of what’s needed to achieve continuous delivery through DevOps.
      After reading your comments I must say that I agree with you and that although I didn’t mention it, mastering prerequisite skills is absolutely necessary.
      Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

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