Devops — we’re getting it wrong
2 years ago, if you had asked me about the same, I would have laughed even at the thought of it. Mesmerised by how cloud providers make everything too easy to configure, I was all in to put my credit card in full use to sign up for one.
And that’s exactly the problem. They are making things too easy! Forgive me if I sound like a boomer who cribs about how complicated things were back in his time, but that’s the fact. And with complexity in configuring things, you had no choice but to understand the nitty gritty of how things work. With this understanding comes the inherent knowledge of the basics — basics of networking, linux systems, operating systems, containerisation, CICD and what not.
Any engineer working in the devops domain is expected to have a lot of patience and stress tolerance. There will be ample outages, dead ends, and critical moments where you are expected to spin up the services to minimise downtime. That’s what stands them out. I remember how I would casually sit down with my senior after office hours, wondering why he keeps staring at that screen full of gibberish logs. He would go and on for hours, closely observing 4 terminal screens at a time, waiting for that aha! moment. And that’s how he became that go to guy in the team for anything application related. Not just infrastructure, but code too. Yes! A devops person actively codes, with expertise in infrastructure obviously.
What I’m observing these days is completely different. “Devops” engineers are extremely reliant on cloud. Want to monitor the memory utilisation of a machine? Let’s use cloudwatch! Want to spin up new docker containers? Let’s use some fancy UI tool that does that for us. Want to host a UI application, let’s just integrate the github with netlify and let it do that for us. In addition to that for some reason we still don’t consider application development as part of devops. We’re still mistaking devops with sysops I guess. Anyway, let’s keep that topic for later.
I understand it’s the hot product right now. And it’s definitely a necessity, looking at how fast the industry is proceeding. But I’m afraid this heavy reliance on cloud providers is creating two categories of engineers — ones who can do stuff, as long their cloud provider has a dashboard/one click button for it. And ones who can do stuff irrespective, just because it boils down to the basics. Be the latter.
And then there’s this frenzy that “certifications” are creating. The industry is driven by certifications it seems. As long as you are comfortable working on a particular cloud provider, you’re a certified devops engineer. As soon as it comes down to getting hands dirty on a native machine, those certificates lose their value.
Again, I’m in no way ranting about the pace at which cloud is transforming. It definitely has made things easier, reduced costs, allowed us to focus on other things and increased enthusiasm in devops. Frankly speaking, I myself would find it difficult to do many things if you remove cloud from the picture. But I’d love to see devops as a celebrated field not just because it has fancy cloud offerings, but because it’s much more than that. It’s an ecosystem consisting of highly efficient machines, amazing open source contributions and above all, probably the only field covering all aspect of the application.
