One of the things I hear periodically from critics of the DevOps movement is that it’s too heavy on the “Dev” side of things. For example, here’s a rant about how DevOps is a power grab by developers (and here’s a response to that rant). The way Circonus CEO Theo Schlossangle put it to us at NodeSummit is that DevOps gets Dev into Ops, but doesn’t really get Ops into Dev. He says the pendulum has swung too far to the devloper side.

But is this true? Look at this piece of advice for developers from Puppet create and Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies:

Sysadmins are likely to own the software for much longer than the developers — what are you doing to make their stewardship pleasant enough that they look forward to your next deployment?

That sure doesn’t sound like someone trying to grab more power for developers.

Here’s another rant from early last year: Devops Is a Poorly Executed Scam. In it, the author Ted Dziuba laments the lack of definitive DevOps practices and lists a set of ideas for improving developer and operations relations as an alternative for DevOps:

• Developers are in the on-call rotation If you ship a feature, you help support it. This one is first because it’s the most important. If you architect a system, you write the Nagios alerts for it, and they page your phone. Believe me, you will get a crystal clear understanding of why ops throws up so many roadblocks after doing this for a few months.
• Developers develop in the same environment production runs in If you deploy to Linux, you develop on Linux. No more of this coding on your Macbook Pro and deploying to Ubuntu: that is why you can’t have nice things.
• Downtime never happens twice After problems are fixed short-term, you make it first priority to ensure that the same failure does not happen again.

The thing is, that list actually sounds a lot like DevOps to me. In fact, Kanies told me last year that the Puppet is working on helping solve the problem of a conflict between development and production environments. That’s also a big part of what Cloud Foundry is focusing on by making Cloud Foundry as similar on an OSX notebook and on a Red Hat server as possible, and by offering a virtual machine called Micro Cloud Foundry. Environment management seems to be the next big problem for DevOps tool providers to solve.

That idea of putting developers on the on-call rotation also sounds like a particularly good one. I asked PagerDuty co-founder Baskar Puvanathasan if many of the company’s customers, many of whom are leading DevOps practicioners, put developers on the call rotation, or if it’s mostly system administration types. He said that most PagerDuty customers include developers in the call rotation.

So what can we conclude?

1) DevOps is not a power grab.
2) There’s widespread confusion as to what DevOps really means.
3) The burden is on DevOps advocates to offer concrete suggestions as to how to make DevOps actually work, and to dispel misconceptions as to what DevOps means.

Part of the problem is that there remains a lack of clear resources as to just what DevOps is and how to do it. That’s part of what Dziuba means when he says it’s a poorly executed scam – unlike the agile development movement, which had multiple books and seminars and so forth, there are few DevOps gurus telling the world how DevOps is done. That’s what I hope blogs like this one, along with communities like DevOps Zone can help with.

The other problem may be the extent to which developers are now treated like rock stars. That’s got to burn a lot of people on the operations side. I know from first hand experience that ops people – system admins, system engineers, networks engineers, data center managers, etc. – have it rough. They work long hours, have enormous pressures and are often seen as “cost centers” who love saying no and slowing down progress. It’s often thankless job.

Meanwhile, we keep hearing “developers, developers, developers” and “developers are the new king makers.” The RedMonk analysts try to make it clear that when they say “developers” what they really mean is “practitioners.” They include system admins, designers, etc. in their definition of “developers.” But it does seem that most people are pretty focused on programmers, not the people out there racking and stacking servers, when they say “developers.”

It makes a certain amount of sense for business people to be very focused on programmers and data scientists. Both are in short supply, and are in a position to make or break a lot of organizations as many companies start to become more engineering focused. It would be great to see more love showered on the haggard IT people behind the scenes, but the public’s hearts and minds are with the developer-entrepreneur now. Still, developers should take the advice of Yammer engineering lead Matt Eernisse at Nodeconf last year: communicate with the operations staff, because they are the ones that are going to have to deal with problems in the middle of the night. In fact, you should make them your best friends. If the mantra for business people is “developers, developers, developers” then the mantra for developers must be “operations, operations, operations.”

Photo by Leonardo Rizzi