SysAdmins should retrain as SREs or risk going the way of the cobbler, says Devoteam

In the era of DevOps as a Service there's no room for traditional Ops roles - or Jenkins or Team City

According to Graham Zabel, head of DevOps at technology consultancy Devoteam, enterprise software production has evolved in a way that parallels changes in shoe manufacturing.

A few decades ago, shoes were hand made by individual cobblers. These cobblers had their own desks and from which hung the tools of their trade. Each cobbler had dozens of tools, including bespoke or highly specialised creations for stitching an upper or gluing a sole.

When DevOps was in its infancy a similar situation existed, said Zabel during his presentation at the Computing DevOps Live event on Wednesday.

"It was a cottage industry. All these dev teams have all these different sets of tools. In a large organisation you had hundreds of dev teams all doing DevOps in their own way".

At this stage in its evolution, senior management was not even aware of what was going on. DevOps grew organically from the ground up, adapting as new tools became available.

This started to change when CIOs and CTOs started to realise Ops was becoming expensive. At this stage, there was a movement to offshore Ops to countries where wages were lower. Together with this, there was a move to co-ordinate the players in the cottage industry by creating a centralised DevOps team, together with centralised tooling and rationalised licensing.

The shoemaking equivalent was the adoption of production lines. Each conveyor produced thousands of the same shoe and was then refitted being fitted to make another type. Now shoe production was more efficient and more consistent.

For enterprise software this era - which Zabel labelled Enterprise DevOps - was a move in the right direction, but it introduced problems of its own. "This was fine in a way, but it took a lot of autonomy away from developers, so now instead of the cobbler choosing his own tools, you must use Jenkins or a central Git repository, and developers tend to rail against that."

Largely still on-premises, there were now fewer tools and a fewer vendors, but many of the other problems of large, disparate siloed systems remained. Upgrades and maintenance were challenging, with build servers running numerous different versions of software, and the existence of multiple custom integrations made Enterprise DevOps unmanageable in some large organisations.

The third stage in the evolution is just beginning. Zabel dubbed it ‘DevOps as a Service'. "This is happening in large enterprises largely as a skunkworks project, or a side project with a couple of teams where you say ‘let's try this a different way'."

Shoemaker Adidas recently opened its SpeedFactory in Germany. The production of shoes has been brought back in house, but this time they are 3D printed by robots. These robots can make a red shoe followed by a white shoe and a blue shoe, because there is no production line to set up.

"You went from a system making thousands of shoes with thousands of low-cost workers to where you have the shoes made by robots just dozens of automation engineers."

The software equivalent of SpeedFactory is the use of cloud-based integrated toolchains.

In large organisations, DevOps automation has moved to the cloud where you get much better cost transparency and integrated toolchains, Zabel explained.

"The tooling landscape shrinks drastically and you're dealing with potentially one vendor rather than dozens, you have no infrastructure to manage, your software is evergreen with no upgrading problems and it's all highly modular."

At this stage DevOps becomes much easier, Zabel said. What's more, because it is easier to understand, management is more likely to fund it. On the tools side, it means migration to the integrated toolchains of AWS, Azure, GitLab and GCP.

As DevOps as a Service moves outwards from the few large corporates that are doing it now, certain roles will inevitably head the way of the traditional cobbler. Zabel urged DBAs, SysAdmins, and network operations people to think about retraining as site reliability engineers (SREs). And the tools they use could go the way of the cobbler's last and awl too.

"I used to love Team City; I used it every day. I don't use it any more. If I was Jenkins I'd be very concerned about how I will fit into the DevOps as a service model. I see tools like Jenkins as potentially legacy now," Zabel said.

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