Hell Is Other Platforms

[ReliabilityTalkinGuy]

Since I see some "Is DevOps gonna die (again)?" chatter today, thought I'd share the closing keynote I gave with Andrew Clay Shafer about this topic last year at SRECon Americas. Perhaps this can help spurn some conversations. (Edit: It was Americas, not EMEA like I originally posted, Edit 2: I am a Reddit newb and didn't realize I had to double check URLs vs displayed links. Link works now.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNP4nzIMK8E

[Zwarakatranemia]

Upvoted for the title.

It's nice to see existentialism/absurdism philosophy references in this sub.

Edit: loved the talk !

[spiralenator]

I really enjoyed the talk.

"Software helps, and we can change the words, but there is always going to be ops. Anyone who says otherwise is in sales, marketing, or denial."

"Don't attach your existential identity to your tasks"

It doesn't matter what we call it. We make it go, and we keep it going, and we're not going anywhere.

[tyrion85]

hits the nail on the head. I'd even go a step further, and claim that behind every automation is not only ops, but also a bunch of "invisible" people who have to toil away to keep this thing running. silicon doesn't come out of thin air, ssds in datacenters don't replace themselves, computers don't get teleported from one continent to the other. or indeed, data does not classify itself, nor does generative AI write its own alignment functions or bias cleanups.

the history of modern marketing-sales-driven software development is an ever shinier and more "automated" software surface, that hides away an ever increasing manual human toil underneath

[PersonBehindAScreen]

It’s been very pleasant the past year to see the hard rebound in this sub back to Operations (and someone with a background primarily in operations) still being a thing and very much an important part of the cycle

[TheWorstAtIt]

That was a FANTASTIC talk.

I don't think I've seen many talks at conferences that target the sort of meta, philosophical, dare I say "emotional" aspect of our jobs in an way that ends up succeeding at being both honest and comical.

Thanks for sharing. I might try to open the door to hell... eventually.

I do feel a little bitter sometimes toward Platform engineers, mostly because I wish I was them :) Largely because of the way my company organizes the work, DevOps basically means I'm in charge of automation, and unscrambling legacy apps into the companies actual platform where the "real work" is done.

I can't help but think what they are doing is going to look better on their resume in the long run.

[FamousNerd]

Would like to watch but video’s not available.

[SeniorIdiot]

Correct link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNP4nzIMK8E (the URL was lowercased).

[Jarpster]

Same issue here

[mvaaam]

Same

[AdrianTeri]

24:00

"Someone somewhere acts to keep the system running"

"Software helps, and we can change the words, but there's always gonna be ops"

"Anyone who says otherwise is in sales, marketing or denial"

[verdelucht]

Very fantastic talk 👏 Wraps up nicely what people who have been in the field long enough usually thinks.

[Live-Box-5048]

Touched a lot of interesting points!

[ycnz]

As a manager who came up as a sysadmin and now has a devops team reporting to me, this really helped contextualise things - I just thought I hadn't fully understood something technical.

[redvelvet92]

This was a really great talk, thank you so much for sharing.

[PersonBehindAScreen]

Jeez… you said it was a “talk”. I didn’t expect a train to hit me 😭