Ops is dead. Long live Ops (DOXLON)

In this blog post we have Federico Fregosi who is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Curve speak at our July DOXLON meetup. He spoke about the future of the DevOps position and the changes that are going on in the industry. Most of the issues brought up are tried to start ups specifically and is mostly about the changes that are happening in the landscape.

There is an evolution in the field that has moved from Systems Administration to Devops and finally managed services which has killed Ops. Because of this there is fear for administrators because of the need to code. Because serverless is so great and inexpensive we have moved from a world where things that were once and ops problem is now an AWS problem. However, serverless may not be as cheap as everyone thought! The time that it takes to run a function and the memory that you need to run the function, if you do computations around this you’ll see that there are cheaper options.

No-ops

What does he mean by NoOps? It means no operations and it’s frightening to most people in DevOps. Essentially developers shouldn’t have to call their operations team evey time they need to deploy something. The DevOps job is not easy as shown by the image below which shows all the tools that DevOps members neeed to know and understand.

Priodic table of devops tools.png

Collaboration

At Curve they are trying to address the fact that the DevOps team have a hard job ahead of them and that the developer team need to do a better job at operations. The goal is to create a good environment to have a operations and developer team work together. A few things that they do are production meetings, joining early on in feature design, and having production readiness checklist and meeting.

Platform Engineering

The people that write the code are not the people that deploy it and his company is well aware of that. In order to make sure that the ship runs smooth the teams must work together so that developers don’t have to worry about where the code will be deployed or where to test it. Some ofthe distributed systems concerns are:

  • Circuit breaking
  • Retrying, Caching
  • Systems monitoring
  • Graceful degradation
  • Rate limiting

Business Value

At the end of the day it’s important to provide value as many small companies are going without a DevOps team because they don’t understand the value. In order to prove that you are providing business value you must creat dashboards and presentations, make procedures as simple as possible, reduce development feedback loop, and don’t be scared of talking money.

Value of devops engineer

At the end of the day the end goal is to not automate yourself.

This content came from DevOps Exchange London (#DOXLON), a monthly DevOps Meetup in London.

If you’d like to speak at a future DOXLON or join the Meetup, please visit the DOXLON Meetup page.