As a "DevOps Engineer" (use to be called Sys Admin) I feel a lot of posters here are using the term wrong.
A lot of us old sys admins are now calling ourselves devops because times are changing. To me devops isn't about taking a developer who likes ops to save some money. Its about taking ops out of their walled garden and into the development process. As someone in ops, I'd much rather be part of the development process as I'm the one supporting the code in production.
If its a choice of message queues.. I'd rather have a vote to the one I know about supporting.
It isn't really about cost savings as some companies I've been in I'm one of the highest paid engineers on the team. Its more about bringing ops into the process.
In addition to that, I always thought DevOps meant operations people using development practices and tools to automate and simplify their lives? Does it have to be more complex than that?
If you take your definition as "ops people who code and automate", you get a really efficient ops team who can orchestrate several hundred or thousand servers.
You still then have a friction point between "dev" and "ops" relating to hand off. Ops could go full PaaS, but more than likely you'll end up with a "cloud" infrastructure where your dev team will have to learn ops, or the traditional model where stuff gets thrown over the fence. Good luck deploying that service because there was no capacity planning and it'll take 6-8 weeks to get hardware from the vendor, regardless of whether ops can rack it and build it in under a day.
It's far better to have an org overlap so that ops is involved in dev planning to help address roadblocks, assist in capacity planning and management, as well as help reduce friction in tasks.
But, the purists would reply, if you simply outsource all your hardware to AWS or another place, you don't ned that ops or capacity planning. Until you do. This weekend AWS ran out of i2.2xlarge instances in a particular AZ, for example.
At my workplace, the DevOps title is basically our Build Engineer who babysits TFS, handles non-compiling code and code changes, & architects and maintains the CI process.
It may sound like that's Dev's job. But they're busy maintaining and detangling the codebase, and handling daily code deploys. Meanwhile Ops acts as a liaison with our hosting company, installs 3rd party software, performs some break/fix work in the environment, and does corporate IT work.
It used to seem crazy, and it probably looks crazy from the outside, but it's still working.
A lot of us old sys admins are now calling ourselves devops because times are changing. To me devops isn't about taking a developer who likes ops to save some money. Its about taking ops out of their walled garden and into the development process. As someone in ops, I'd much rather be part of the development process as I'm the one supporting the code in production.
If its a choice of message queues.. I'd rather have a vote to the one I know about supporting.
It isn't really about cost savings as some companies I've been in I'm one of the highest paid engineers on the team. Its more about bringing ops into the process.