Dev... without Ops

To kick this off, I come from the infrastructure and operations side of this coin. But I'm also of the mindset that my job should always be to remove my job, how much can I automate and orchestrate to remove the need for me to actually be there. This is maybe not the approach that some would take if they want their jobs to remain, but I feel if you're working in IT that this is the driving force behind the enjoyment I get from always learning and growing as technology does. 

With the vast amount of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions available, and the ease of use that comes with such services, especially when used via cloud solutions like Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS etc. As well solutions such as the recently released Technical Preview of the Windows Azure Stack that gives you pretty much Azure on premises, will the ops side of the DevOps be required in the future. Turn key solutions, that in a short time go from bare metal to a platform you can push code to with such minimal effort.

For me, this is an exciting time, as it seems were getting ever closer to removing my role within the IT world, which I feel is my goal. But that also opens a lot of opportunities too. What areas to focus on now, how to prepare to deal with such environments on a large scale, and what other areas can we reduce the 'human' factor in. It's not something to fear, but gives me great joy in looking forward to what extra value added work I can do when I'm not stuck firefighting things. Why firefight when you can simply destroy an environment and spawn up more microservices with some code, with a scaleable application that's resilient to a few nodes being down.

This isn't going to be an overnight transition, and I've also been reading about the loads that are put on the developers too, who are now expected to do much more than make amazing code because of the pressures of what DevOps can burden them with as they are expected to do and know more. It's definitely got me thinking more about what skills I should posses to grow in my career and best help my company to move with the times of the technology and solutions available.

So, possibly this post is a bit of a question to myself, where should I look to now to make sure I do add value to the company I work for and best assist in bridging the gap between the developers and the platforms they require as their canvases for their great art of code?