DevOps Summit: One day, you're not going to have an operations team, because hardware will be gone
Computing Summit panel suggests a spectrum of DevOps will drive business forward
DevOps will become a necessity for enterprise technology as a move towards virtualisation requires development and operations staff to combine their skillsets to ensure that the business continues to operate smoothly.
That was one of the key takeaways from a panel discussion on Understanding the Business Need for DevOps, which took place at the recent Computing DevOps Summit 2015.
Robert Logan, development operations at insurance group QMetric, argued that DevOps has been around for some time. However, rather than being called DevOps, it was just the process of development and operations teams working together.
"As an operations guy it's weird because I went across the divide when it wasn't called DevOps - I was an operations guy who worked with the developers," he said.
Logan noted that despite the operations skillset being "particularly unique and useful for a load of developers", there's actually a fear of operations among development staff, who see operations as something that will forcibly change what they do.
"It's an interesting thing: one of the key things about DevOps is that most of the developers are frightened of doing most operations stuff because there are people who have built and constructed these things for years and years who say 'this is very important'," he said.
However, Logan argued that what DevOps is really about is "giving the developers the chance to test and apply their ideas". Ultimately, he argued, that involves developers learning operations because there will eventually be a time when a separate operations team becomes an obsolete concept.
"One day, you're probably not going to have an operations team at all, because hardware will be virtualised and gone," Logan said, citing how businesses are increasingly moving infrastructure to the cloud.
"In the business I work for now, there's nothing. It's all in the cloud. In the businesses I worked for previously, it was half-way to being in the cloud. Businesses that used to be entirely hardware based are now in the cloud," he said.
For Logan, the shift means that he sees his job becoming more of an operations consultation role to developers. "I can see myself talking to a developer about not doing that database update because we can't go back on it; I've done those things before and experienced the horror of it," said Logan.
"That's what you have to get across to developers, because instead of you saying, well, my skillset is different, you start passing that on and becoming an oracle of some wisdom," he added.
Changing roles
Grant Smith, author of Next Gen DevOps: Creating the DevOps Organisation, agreed that virtualisation is changing the dynamic between, and roles of, development and operations teams.
"I totally agree that virtual [is the future], whether everyone moves to Amazon or it's all going to be consumer cloud, or people are going to have their own clouds. But the reality is there is always going to be people mucking about with hardware," he said.
Smith argued that, in order for DevOps to work, organisations need to find out which part of that spectrum works best for them.
"I think you can see then, that by merging those development, testing and operation skills and collaborating together will make a great deal of sense," Smith said, adding that there are some areas that simply won't suit developers.
"You're probably not going to waste your developers' time unpacking boxes of hardware and racking them in racks," he said.
But what DevOps is ultimately about, said Smith, is about a spectrum of requirements that require flexible staff, both in the operations and development sides of teams.
Building software, testing software, deploying software, getting the feedback, iterating, that does require these days a full range of skills," he concluded.
However, one way in which DevOps shouldn't be used is to build more silos, warned Jonathan Fletcher, technology and platform lead at insurance company Hiscox. Speaking later at the DevOps summit, he described that approach as "Jar Jar Binks bad".