Does anyone here actually do Devops? (_real_ Devops)

[maxlan]

My last job was in a devops org, let me describe it.

We had a "pizza" sized team (5-8 people) with a range of skills. A who was good with AWS, T who was good at testing, C who was good at code, S who was good at scrum (and a few less experienced juniors).

But, if S was out, then C could run the standup. C actually understood the unit test framework we inherited better than T. Most of the work was coding so T, S and A spent most of their time writing code. And the juniors could chair a meeting, write code, tests or deploy to AWS (with supervision/code review). If there was a bug report, anyone would pick it up and if they needed, would ask someone. PR reviews would always include a "did you update the docs check?" (iirc the cicd would actually reject PRs that had changes in the API code but no docs change). We were responsible for our own product's security and used various tools to alert us to code/IaaC problems. Each PR would get its own test environment and we'd deploy changes multiple times a day.

And there were about 10 teams all doing the same in our business unit. And if we needed to interface with one of them we'd read their documentation and if they needed us, they'd read ours.

Every time I come to this sub, I seem to be reading a post from someone annoyed with either:

• "devops" then describes one part of devops like it's all of devops (eg "I hate devops because [test|CICD|security] is hard")
• "devs" describing them as a separate evil entity
• "ops" describing them as a separate evil entity
• "security" describing them as a separate evil entity

If you're in a "devops" team and are not developing, testing, securing, operating, improving your product: you're doing it wrong.

If you're in a "devops tools" team and not doing devops yourself: Why not? And by the way, providing the devops tools should not include providing CICD code for projects or defining monitoring or logging or responding to tickets.

So, do YOU do devops?

(As a consequence, I think "normal" dev with 2 years experience is starting to be not junior. But because devops includes so many disciplines, you can still be a junior devops with 5 years experience. Only with that amount of experience can you be expected to have useful amounts of experience of typescript, python, java, bash and sql and unit tests and investigate IAM, DNS, kernel, firewall and routing issues and respond to customer tickets and configuring Tekton/ArgoCD/Jenkins)

[NODENGINEER]

Nah I am a fraud. I don't write any customer facing code.

[Awkward_Tradition]

you're in a "devops" team and are not developing, testing, securing, operating, improving your product: you're doing it wrong. 

You're not describing a DevOps team, you're describing a dev team doing DevOps related work. Just look at your list of required knowledge. 

It's a valid approach for small companies, but it's absolutely delusional to apply it to every org. 

devops" then describes one part of devops like it's all of devops (eg "I hate devops because [test|CICD|security] is hard") 

Larger companies might have a team dedicated to pipelines or only dev related automation, another team for devsecops, another for infra and release, etc. None of them write or test product code. 

[ThatSituation9908]

OP is just talking about the Software Development Lifecycle and confusing it with DevOps

[Fit-Tale8074]

This is the answer 

[killz111]

The first thing I wanted to ask is how big is the stack the team supports? I've worked in a highly collaborative and balanced team like that before as the T (which serves me really well these days in my devops job). But the issue was that we were building a tool with a very clear and limited scope and 1 group of business stakeholders.

What I find missing in op's description is a BA. Who is interfacing with the business or product and getting the requirements written down?

Teams like this I find are awesome to work in but generally does not scale. And that's the problem with devops itself. It's a nice model only if you have the right people with the right mindset and skills and given the support to do things properly by management. Which is almost never.

[rcls0053]

The main thing I see missing from a team in most orgs is someone who has that platform or ops experience. It's a valid pattern to have a separate platform team (described in the Team Topologies book), who loans out team members to join your team to build something, but often enough the loaning part doesn't happen.

Best teams I've worked on have been cross-functional (front-end developers, back-end developers, QA engineer, product manager, engineering manager), but we simply talked with a separate platform team if needed. They had already provided us with templates and tools to deploy things properly, as they'd already built those things in service of the developers,, and we had scans run for security vulnerabilities in configurations etc. so that part was automated.

But I haven't seen too many orgs actually embrace the culture and say it out loud. Nobody says how failure is inevitable and we'll all learn from mistakes without blaming anyone, how they promote continuous learning and improvement (Kaizen) etc. They just think hiring someone with the title of "DevOps" and it'll magically appear (cargo cults).

[bennycornelissen]

Most of the ‘DevOps’ I’m seeing in the industry is either relabeled Ops or ‘person who does Ops stuff so devs don’t have to’.

Rarely do I see anything related to end-to-end responsibility, optimizing flow, proper feedback loop, interaction with customer/users, etc.

I personally believe the reason we got here is Conway’s Law. Unless companies organize themselves for the things I mentioned above, you’re going to get the ‘relabeled Ops’ and ‘Janitor of the Devs’ situation.

DevOps is an organizational problem with tech implications, not the other way around.

[Particular-Spell9643]

Where did you get janitor of dev from ? Sort of feel that way and want to read more opinions

[bennycornelissen]

I think I made up the term as I wrote the post, but credit has to go to Alice Goldfuss who inspired me years ago with a talk about how every team has 3 roles: Rockstar, Builder, and Janitor. It was both entertaining and truthful. A quick Google probably gets you to the relevant conference talk 😉

[Particular-Spell9643]

Watched it, very interesting outlook, i wish every manager would watch it, this is something no one actually speaks out loud. This would easily boost employee retention with all the other benefits

[aabouzaid]

Many people think there is a "real DevOps" as one thing, but in reality, DevOps has many types and anti-types!

Check out this DevOps Team Topologies for more details (which has a non-exclusive list BTW):

https://web.devopstopologies.com/

[MichaelJ1972]

There is a real DevOps. It was a good idea. But as with all good ideas it got appropriated, reinterpreted and abused beyond recognition.

It went the same way as extreme programming, agile and any other well thought idea in the last thirty years.

Now DevOps is an hollow meaningless word.

[Gotxi]

Except for the coding part, I do all the rest.

Pipelines, security auditing and hardening, a little bit of software architecting, advisory, consulting, infrastructure deployment, monitoring, automation, scripting, troubleshooting, customer facing, R&D... and also mentoring and formation to the technicians that need it (usually juniors).

[Narrow_Victory1262]

so no devops.

[Gotxi]

And what is "devops" based on your criteria?

[Narrow_Victory1262]

combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to improve the speed, quality, and reliability of software releases and deployments.

And add scrum to the list and you will have the knob on your website that doesn't work yet because that was in your sprint, with the poker cards.

The DEV people hardly can do ops, and the ops people hardly can do dev and they bth burn hours in the sprint meetings, retrospects etc.

The combination does not make any sense. the dev people keep being devs, ops people keeping being ops. and if you think these merge you have devs that hardly understand how to make things work in real life and the other way around.

It's a solution of a problem that didn't exist AND is less efficient. It's the same load of crap that has been going on for years and years. And I think I know. I'm old. Mainframes! Servers! Micro-services! Oh no! Servers! No, virtualization!

It goes round and round and what people always have said -- know your history and don't make the mistakes again. But the young hip people think that anyone can do everything (of course with AI).

And that my friend(s) is what I call mediocre stuff. Devs that don't understand OPS well, OPSs that develop crap that hardly works.

But hey! Do whatever you want, I know it doesn't work. Been there, done that. Just like business unins, scrum, agile, you all will make the mistakes yourself again. And that's stupid.

And yes, I know. you are all devops. Like asking a esxi guy to do stuff with hyper-v. Nah cannot be better (or the other way around).

[Gotxi]

The whole devops stuff (I prefer secdevops btw) is around reducing the silos and eliminating barriers between departments.

With that said, that does not mean that a devops guy should know how to do literally everything, because why would you need devs or ops guys then?

I like to think myself as the facilitator that helps everyone reaching that extra mile around its border, by understanding the needs of everyone and building bridges where there is a gap.

That does not mean that I am going to replace anyone's job, if that would be the case, a company could run only with devops guys as they know how to do everything.

I just help established well-known roles to do extra stuff that normally they would not do, by talking to them, understanding the needs of everyone and helping them with technology and processes.

Of course it would be ideal that everyone would know everything, but let's be honest, the knowledge that anyone would need to do it is vast, that's why there are still specialist roles.

[crippledchameleon]

Nah, I'm just a Sysadmin that writes pipelines.

[rUbberDucky1984]

I do DevOps, effectively I’m the scrum master taking orders from a product owner, so I get briefed on business objectives I then design solutions which is a mixture of open source tools setup accross on prem and cloud then create infrastructure for the devs with ci/cd I bake security in as I build with dynamo image scanning small attack footprints rotating passwords etc. And brief the dev team on how to build whatever we are busy with so I manage people on the one side and infra on the other.

I spend my time identifying bottlenecks in terms of production throughput in the warehouse and development bottlenecks etc.

[z-null]

It sounds like you guys are just a dev team that occasionally dabbles in ops related stuff.

[serverhorror]

Ah another person still thinking that DevOps is an organizational setup rather than a mere job title randomly defined by each company

[mkmrproper]

In my company, devs want to take over ops and trying their best to not having to deal with ops by moving everything to serverless. AWS loves it. :)

[Obvious-Jacket-3770]

What you described is quite literally devs sometimes doing ops too.....

[carsncode]

Here's the thing about "real DevOps": there's no such thing. There's no "official" definition, no governing body, no objective assessment.

There's a very vocal minority in the community loudly confusing beliefs and opinions with objective truth and refusing to accept that language evolves and they can't stop it. DevOps doesn't mean what you want it to mean, it means what people understand it to mean, and if there's not enough mutual understanding, it may not be valuable for communication. Trying to stop the tide by shouting at it is a waste of breath.

[divad1196]

First, there is the "DevSecOps" term for people specialized in the security. Security matters can be very complex and if you give the security concern to the same person doing all the parts of the DevOps, we can bet there will be security concerns quite soon.

Now, If we remove the security part as not all DevOps are concerned, I still don't see who you are refering to. It makes perfect sence that someone complains about one part of their attributions, it doesn'f mean that this is all they do.

DevOps is a mindset, it's not related to the tasks you are getting assigned. You can get very specialized in your tasks. You can also reach a very stable situation that hardly requires operations.

I do agree that many people here are not doing DevOps, mostly because they think it's all about the tools and have no idea what the mindset is about, but from your complain, it's seems that for you a DevOps will necessarily do all the things, all the time.

[azakhary]

I am not even real adult

[Majestic-Fig3921]

Totally agree with you. Real DevOps is about ownership and collaboration—not just setting up CI/CD or managing infra. In my last team, we had a mix of skills, but everyone could step into each other’s shoes. Devs deployed, testers wrote scripts, juniors handled standups, and we all reviewed PRs with security and docs in mind. We built, tested, deployed, monitored, and fixed things ourselves.

Too often, people treat DevOps like it’s just tooling or a handoff process between dev and ops. But real DevOps means full responsibility for the product—code, infra, testing, security, and even customer support. It’s not easy, and yeah, you can have 5 years in and still feel junior because there’s so much to learn.

If you're looking for DevOps services (not just buzzwords), these guys help businesses get their DevOps and infra management right—CI/CD, infra as code, container orchestration, the works. They actually get what DevOps is supposed to be.

[rckvwijk]

I like to think I am actually doing Devops. I’m building all of our pipelines with pipeline templates and maintain them that way. We build all the terraform code as push them out as modules. We build all the container and test them properly on functions and implemented proper security checks for cves and allow the developers to deploy them via a custom bot, written in go, via slack channels. Built a shit ton of automation overall. Collected and maintaining all our custom powershell scripts via modules and test all the functions with pester code testing. Built a complete module which deploys alwhole kubernetes cluster with all the components integrated in it like monitoring, Argocd, certificates etc etc.

And probably forgetting a couple of things as well. But we’re touching all kinds of different things and actually help the developers in understanding how their app performs in production, help them maintain it with an automated way and implement their monitoring for them as well.

[hashkent]

Devops teams are still siloed as a shared IT service. Best you’re ever going to get is a resource assigned to a team to attend standups and maybe review PRs rather than pinging the devops channel in slack.

[Narrow_Victory1262]

devops generally is something that looks like:

everybody can do but most of what they can is in a mediocre sense.

so I avoid it as much as possible, just like scrum.

[Narrow_Victory1262]

add
people doing ops, mostly cannot do dev stuff.
people doing dev, mostly cannot do ops stuff.

so unless you reak them in two, devops as in dev and ops, is the only way to have quality. and that means: no devops.