Matty Stratton

Posted on Oct 26, 2018 Edited on Jul 31 Originally published at mattstratton.com

Hot Takes, Myths, And Falsehoods - Why Everyone Is Wrong About DevOps (Except For Me)

#devops #culture #discuss

(Adapted from a talk I gave at DevOpsDays Indianapolis and DevOpsDays Riga)

Don't believe everything you read on the internet when it comes to DevOps. A lot of people think they know what they are talking about, but they really don't.

Here's a simple list of some common misconceptions about DevOps, and why they are wrong.

“DevOps is more than just tools”

False!

If it was more than just tools, why would we have so many of them?
Nobody cares about your culture
There are a LOT of tools on DevOps twitter

“DevOps is more than just automation”

False!

The “A” in CAMS is the only vowel
Vowels are more important than consonants
Therefore, automation is the most important

“Kubernetes won’t solve all your problems”

False!

Kubernetes came from Google
Docker is boring and old
YAML shows your commitment to precision

“If you DevOps, you still need testing”

False!

Remove the human element and remove the human error
If your microservice only does one thing, it can’t have an error. That would be an additional thing
QA people are annoying anyway

“You can’t buy DevOps”

False!

You may not be able to buy it, but I can sell it to you
Seriously, I would love to sell you some devops
What will it take to get you in a devops today?

“DevOps is not a title”

False!

Nobody can tell you what titles to use in your organization
I suppose your HR people can
But what does HR know anyway?

“You can do DevOps on Windows”

False!

A key component of DevOps is a smug sense of self-satisfaction
Windows is all click-next, right?
Something something slashdot

“Cats are more aligned with DevOps than dogs”

False!

Need I say more?

Note - if you take any of this too seriously, we need to have a conversation

Top comments (14)

Ben Halpern • Oct 26 '18

Remove the humans, remove the human error? 🤔

Yoandy Rodriguez Martinez • Oct 29 '18

....and that's how Ben created Skynet

Julia Torrejón • Oct 26 '18

QA people are annoying anyway.

David Wickes • Oct 26 '18

I enjoyed that... but let's dig a little deeper as you know what you're talking about.

So, what is DevOps? I've always taken it to be that me (a developer) should take responsibility for the deployment of the code that I've written, taking over some of the operational responsibilities of someone who, once upon a time, would have been taking care of a server. This is made possible because I can control a load of virtual computers using ~~the MAGIC CLOUD~~ remotely hosted servers.

I think it's just another bit of the stack I get to play with. Hooray (maybe).

Something like that? Am I right?

If I am, what does it mean to only do DevOps? Are these the people building the tools I use to make doing DevOps easier?

Anyway, like I said - I enjoyed it!

YourTech John • Oct 28 '18

Originally DevOps was posited as a cultural shift where Devs and Ops teams worked together on both the design of an application and the deployment. It's supposed to be the opposite of "throw it over the wall" where a Dev writes their program, makes sure it works on their laptop/test environment, and then gives some sort of artifact to the Ops team for them to deploy/update. In general though, it's kind of turned into what you experience with devs taking over ops, as long as those ops are "in the cloud."

I come from the other direction, background in ops. My "DevOps" work is automating bare metal server installs, writing tools to make that happen and pretty web interfaces to watch it all happen.

I personally like to think of DevOps as replacing ad-hoc commands and bash scripts with yaml.

Yoandy Rodriguez Martinez • Oct 26 '18 • Edited

Something something slashdot

This just made my day

Rafal Pienkowski • Oct 27 '18

You wrote in the section: ”Kubernetes won’t solve all your problems” that ”Docker is boring and old.”

Could you give me more light on this? I thought that Kubernetes is an orchestration framework for Docker containers. Without Docker, Kubernetes isn't needed. But maybe I'm wrong. Please correct me.

David J Eddy • Nov 1 '18

It's part of the joke. Most people not well versed in the content have wildly incorrect views of the tools and abilities of the tools.

Sagar • Oct 27 '18

Thanks for the great article.

Sometimes I feel that DevOps job is most difficult as compared to a programming job. In DevOps we have to take care of lots of things and there is a lack of good resource to refer on the internet.