Bad DevOps is bad. But bad DevOps is basically no worse than what people were doing before: you'd just have a bunch of VMs running fedora20 with no way of easily patching all of them at once. Except some of the VMs may be running fedora23 because they were part of an expansion that happened 2 years after the original set and the guy who deployed them couldn't find a fedora20 image. And at least with a container, you can more easily use AWS for spare capacity/redundancy while you migrate servers. DevOps doesn't fix every sysadmin problem, but it gives you a lot more options that can be developed/deployed in a small amount of time.
DevOps is bad when you take your worst developer and say "do sysadmin tasks and still write application code". It works much better when you take an experienced sysadmin and embed them into a dev team. Make them do code reviews on deployment scripts with a developer, assign tasks within sprints, etc. Code reviews aren't because you don't know how to code -- IMO the primary benefit of code reviews is the education of the reviewer. Likewise, the sysadmin's struggles become the developers' struggles, and the developers are more likely to write applications that are easy to support if they have some role in supporting them.
Every company over a certain size has politics. It's unavoidable. Maybe Google doesn't -- I don't know. But not every company can be Google. You can't use technology to overcome process problems, but you can and should use technology as a part of a redesigned, better process. DevOps gives you more options, and has a positive effect on the culture of a development org. It asks them to think of portability and supportability as a concern.
DevOps is bad when you take your worst developer and say "do sysadmin tasks and still write application code". It works much better when you take an experienced sysadmin and embed them into a dev team. Make them do code reviews on deployment scripts with a developer, assign tasks within sprints, etc. Code reviews aren't because you don't know how to code -- IMO the primary benefit of code reviews is the education of the reviewer. Likewise, the sysadmin's struggles become the developers' struggles, and the developers are more likely to write applications that are easy to support if they have some role in supporting them.
Every company over a certain size has politics. It's unavoidable. Maybe Google doesn't -- I don't know. But not every company can be Google. You can't use technology to overcome process problems, but you can and should use technology as a part of a redesigned, better process. DevOps gives you more options, and has a positive effect on the culture of a development org. It asks them to think of portability and supportability as a concern.