How We Saved $132k a Year With an IT Infrastructure Audit

Re:How We Saved $132k a Year With an IT Infrastructure Audit by tristor on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @12:02PM (#11439650)

What exactly is "DevOps" to you? I ask, because almost everyone has a different answer. I've been doing "DevOps" for more than ten years, and all of the items you listed as required skill-sets are within my capabilities and have been used at many of the places I've worked. I'd be hard pressed to call someone an ops person if they don't understand the basics of server hardware, networking, and storage. These are essential components which the system relies on, the same system you are responsible for the uptime of.

I often hear things like your statements and can't help but wonder if the general quality of ops people is so bad in our industry and I just haven't encountered it, or if the reason ops people are treated so poorly in most organizations is just that developers automatically assume we don't know anything rather than asking.

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Re:How We Saved $132k a Year With an IT Infrastructure Audit by UK-AL on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @12:06PM (#11439680)

Devops for me would be things like puppet, networking(subnets, load balancing, firewalls etc) deployments, Cloud Formation templates, ARM Templates rather than directly setting up hardware.

Where a dedicated networking would know specifics of certain vender. You can make career out of just knowing how to set up CISCO hardware and CISCO's embedded os. Devop's people tend to be broader than that.

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Re:How We Saved $132k a Year With an IT Infrastructure Audit by tristor on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @12:13PM (#11439734)

All of the items you listed fall under my definition of "DevOps" as well. I loosely define it in two ways:

1) "DevOps is a philosophy, not a title" (this is mostly because of managers thinking otherwise)

2) "DevOps is about focusing on automation of systems infrastructure to improve reliability, flexibility, and security."

Regarding #2, though, since my past experience includes building public clouds, my perspective does not limit "DevOps" to only utilizing public clouds. You can automate the build-out of physical hardware too. It's not really possible to automate rack n stack, but you can abstract that away through external logistics vendors that pre-rack/cable gear for you at a certain scalability point.

Things like OpenStack Ironic, Dell Crowbar, Cobbler, Foreman, etc. are definitely DevOps tools, yet they are specifically focused on handling automation of physical hardware deployments.

As a further example, many networking vendors now provide APIs, but even when they didn't they had SSH interfaces. It was very possible to automate the deployment of large quantities of networking gear using remote-execution tools like Ansible or even just Ruby or BASH scripts. There's no need necessarily to have a dedicated networking person.

Of course, as you scale up to a certain point in physical gear, it pays to have specialization. But that's true even in the cloud, where you may need to hire a specialist to deal with your databases, a specialist to deal with complexities of geographical scale/distributed systems, a specialist to deal with complex cloud networking (VPC et al). Just because something is abstracted away into a virtual space doesn't necessarily reduce its complexity or the base skillsets required to operate that infrastructure.

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