DevOps and DevOps Engineer
Last week I attended a local DevOps meetup. One of the speakers shared his opinion on the role of an Ops Engineer in the organization, and how Developers, as well as other team members should interact with him/her. His talk was followed by series of cross-questions on why to differentiate between Dev and Ops, where all the fuss around DevOps is merging the two said roles! Following are my thoughts on their concerns.
By definition, “DevOps is a software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops).” [Source: Wikipedia]. Though tooling and automation have to be in place to reach to the Nirvana state of DevOps, more important factors for success are, to transform the culture and practices themselves. However, in reality, people and organizations focus more on the former than latter.
While DevOps does not describe any roles, organizations have invented few as an easy way to proclaim they have transformed themselves. One of the most widely used title is DevOps Engineer. All those traditional sys admins, or infrastructure/ environment/ release engineers have been re-tagged with this title, after learning automation tools or securing few AWS certifications. By default most of the Cloud savvy engineers have been referred by this title too. But how good are they in the Dev part of the DevOps? Or have they really started doing Software Development?
I think this title has done more damage to the DevOps practice than good. And coming back to the meetup, this misconception, I believe, was the major reason why people could not digest Dev and Ops as two separate titles. In reality, however, I have seen Developers and Ops engineers being part of the same team, and the team itself functions as a DevOps Team. I have hardly (yes there are few) seen Real DevOps Engineer, who look after end to end development, delivery, operations, and support etc.
Well, it is not specific to this region. I have come across similar thought patterns in Australia as well. Not sure of other parts of the world, so would love to hear from your experiences. Thanks for your time :).
Hi Syed very good article. Are you saying nothing changed during the DevOps era. In the name of DevOps automation kicked in for CI and CD. Time for artifact from Dev till Production reduced from months to hours. Manual steps of traditional developers , testers and sys admins, infra provisioning got reduced and the number/ demand for these roles reduced in DeVOps organizations. But yes your thought is right there is no role called DevOps engineer, the sys admins did not learn coding / testing and vice versa instead SDLC and Release Automation Engineers emerged . I think these Automation engineers who understand both Dev part and Ops part and provide CI CD automation services should be termed as DevOPs engineer.
DevOps installed
Great food for thought!
Agree. Too many places miss the point of DevOps. It is as you say a collaborative team that supports the full lifecycle of a product. There's only been two places so far where I've come across real DevOps in practice. So rare these days!