Sherman Rosa, have you heard of DevOps?

Rosa Of course. Lots of companies have been hiring for DevOps Engineers these days.

Sherman Ugh. I hate it when people say that.

Rosa Oh. Why?

Sherman Everyone knows about DevOps but everyone thinks it’s just a job title. It’s not, though. DevOps is a philosophy!

Rosa I don’t get it. Why are people hiring people for DevOps then?

Sherman Because employers are using it as a buzzword to make one person responsible for what is typically separate fields: Ops, IT, System Administration and Software Development.

Rosa But they get paid pretty well, right?

Sherman Sometimes.

Rosa Well, assuming they get paid well for a position and they like the work, why does it matter?

Sherman It matters because it is a p-h-i-l-o-s-o-p-h-y that an entire company must adhere to for it to work. DevOps is the idea that in any given software team, Development and Operations are done together.

Rosa Sherman, I get that you already said what DevOps Engineers typically need to know, but why is this important to you?

Sherman The entire idea of having one person – or team – consume all of the responsibilities of DevOps defeats the purpose of DevOps. In reality, a “DevOps” Engineer is nothing more than a System Administrator who has to write code.

Rosa And…?

Sherman It defeats the entire purpose of the philosophy.

Rosa Are you sure? You said it’s Dev and Ops together, right? Technically, if you have one person running around making sure that’s the case, a “DevOps” Engineer is a legitimate role. How else would Dev and Ops get together without someone to coordinate?

Sherman That’s the thing. When you do DevOps, all members of the team do DevOps. That means, front end developers are spinning up Containers and Images to test their CRUD integrations. That means QA is talking operating system vulnerabilities with Security Engineers.

Rosa But then doesn’t everyone have to know Ops, IT, System Administration, Software Development, etc…?

Sherman No… I mean, they have to know a little bit about everything…

Rosa That seems like a lot to learn. Who even has time to learn it? DevOps just generally sounds like a SysAdmin wet dream pitched to corporate executives with fancy book titles.

Sherman Haha. But seriously, without DevOps you are going to run into a lot of problems.

Rosa Like what?

Sherman Broken production environments. Enormous, dangerous releases.

Rosa I don’t know, Sherman. I get the feeling like adding a bunch of extra code to your system build just makes things more complicated. Like, when was the last time you saw someone write tests for their Chef cookbooks?

Sherman Hey, I get it. People are not perfect, especially SysAdmins. But this is the one tech philosophy everyone should follow because it involves everyone in the process.

Rosa I see what you’re saying… but don’t you think philosophies are problematic in software development? Developers get so caught up in doing things perfectly that they never get any work done.

Sherman You’re right, and DevOps is a culprit for making things more complicated, which is why the ideas put forth by the philosophy are more important than assigning someone to do the work.

Rosa I think I see what you’re saying. An entire company must adopt DevOps as a philosophy, not necessarily do “DevOps Engineering”.

Sherman Exactly. If your engineering deparment entirely adopts DevOps, they will make room for things like Chef, Vagrant, Travis, Terraform, etc. If you just assign one or two people as DevOps engineers, they may build a bunch of things no one will get to using.

Rosa Okay, okay, I see what you’re saying. But then, in that case, should a company that straddles the line between “DevOps” and “Traditional” technological workflow just fire their DevOps Engineers and save money and time?

Sherman Probably. But then I’d be out of a job.

Rosa So, like I asked, if you’re getting paid well and you like the work, why does it matter what the position is called?

Sherman And I answered it, but I think I agree we should all just be content with it and bring value to our business however we can.

Rosa Right, cause somewhere along the line, someone must recognize that DevOps has value…

Sherman … and if you implement as a DevOps engineer, maybe your company will adopt it entirely.

Rosa Beer?

Sherman Nah. I’m in ketosis right now, but I’ll join you.

Rosa Huh? What kind of a developer are you?

Sherman One trying to keep up with the trends.