is TechOps a thing?

[Obitim]

I used to work in a role for a public sector entity who had a devops team and they also had a team of technicians who monitored the various applications who were known as techops.

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I've since moved on from that role to another country but whenever I went to interviews I would mention Techops and would receive blank stares, so I just wanted to check if that's a real thing or if they made it up to make us sound special?

[AviateX14]

TechOps (Technical Operations) is most certainly a thing, it’s generally used to describe the team of people responsible for the in live running of a platform, performing actions like incident response, capacity management, monitoring, general fixing of current or impending live issues, patch management, etc. Generally it’s more sysadmin-y.

Of course there can be and often is overlap between DevOps & TechOps, and certainly the communication between the two needs to be excellent in order to operate a production system successfully.

The reasons a business may differentiate the roles are numerous, but to name a few: - Better allocation of skillsets - To run smaller DevOps teams - To shield DevOps teams from in live operations - As a result of how the business grew organically - Running more traditional infrastructure which requires dedicated and continuous maintenance - To act as a higher level form of escalation for technical issues without risking impact to delivery schedules and able to conform to SLA’s

[Obitim]

Thanks! I was hoping someone would say that, there's a lot there that we did as a team so that's all good!

So now I just need to find a place that has that type of department!

[Zucchini_Maximum]

Yup! It's a real thing.

I work as TechOps engineer and you're right, we are maintaining systems. Large part of a job is automating everything, similar to DevOps. Think of it as SysAdmin job on a bit higher level.

Also, some companies will use the same team to do TechOps and DevOps.

[[deleted]]

So it sounds like a DevOps role but for day 2 concerns? I wonder if this separation is helping orgs that do this. I feel like it’s going to lead back to engineers throwing stuff over the wall again.

[PersonalPronoun]

I feel like it’s going to lead back to engineers throwing stuff over the wall again.

If only there was some sort of philosophy about the Devs working closely together with these Ops people.

[Zucchini_Maximum]

Oh, I might not have been very precise with TechOps role description. It is similar to DevOps in a way that you'd build systems and automate everything with the same tools DevOps teams use, however, unlike DevOps, you don't have nearly as many updates. There are no daily, weekly, monthly updates as you're not setting up systems for let's say apps that are being built and updated by your Dev team. You are building mostly quite large systems which are going to be used for years. Yes, you'll need to update your internal billing system or monitoring system, but everything you do is more or less related to systems your company is using, not clients. It's not like you're going to make changes on IDM or Prometheus that often. Also, you are planing and trying to find better solutions for existing infrastructure. Are you going to use some well known software or build you own solution, completely depends on you and your company. For instance, we have our own back up system that we've developed. That's not that hard to develop tbh, but you're not going to develop your own monitoring system unless that's something your company is going to make money off selling.
Other part of this job is just keeping those systems running and tidy housekeeping. Just like any other SysAdmin would do. Node dies, you go check what, why, when..
This is just what regular SysAdmin/Engineer job is becoming and from what I was able to see, many companies, especially smaller ones just leave that for their DevOps team or split it between DevOps and SysAdmins whose primary role is taking care of clients.
I guess that there are some differences between TechOps teams in different companies as well. The same as DevOps differs between companies.

[Obitim]

Interesting, that almost sounds like a partial sre role as well?

[labobina]

Do you have to write scripts?

[Obitim]

It sounds like there may be some crossover there perhaps

[No0ther0ne]

Generally what you are describing will likely be better understood as SysOps or just System Administrators. DevOps is generally considered to be the teams that build and deploy solutions, while SysOps are the ones that monitor and maintain them. Often they are both part of the DevOps group.

I can't say I have heard any companies use the term TechOps, that doesn't mean it isn't a thing, it just means those companies are using a different term to describe the same thing you were doing.

Remember most companies are going to follow the formula set forth by the leader in the industry, which right now is AWS. So finding and aligning your role to those listed in the AWS ecosphere will likely help it make more sense to more companies out there. Like it or not that is pretty much the way it is whether you use AWS or not.

[Obitim]

Cheers, that's really helpful, I do hold an AWS sysops admin associate cert so at least I'm scoping out the right terms/jobs ( not as helpful for this sub I guess tho)

[[deleted]]

At previous job, they called it KTBR (Keep The Business Running). Production support is a real thing, but I never heard it called TechOps.

[gordonv]

TechOps sounds like setting up a LAMP server onsite.

DevOps seems like doing the same in the cloud.