To randomly pick an example - sure, automatic filesystem snapshots are a cakewalk these days, and a decade ago they were rather expensive. It seems logical to assume that things that we needed admins to do and rig up somewhat delicate systems for a decade ago are so easy now, we don't need people to focus on that...
This overlooks the fact that the baseline has just moved ahead. Sure you don't need dedicated people for stuff you used to.. but there is new stuff out there that your competitors are hiring dedicated people to work on and push the envelope. if you're okay with doing what you could have done 10 years ago, just using reduced staff, that's great - but it's not going to win you much.
Is operations really going to be a competitive advantage for you? If my startup lets you hail cabs from your smartphone, is an extra 9 of uptime really going to help me beat Uber?
My company's space is pretty crowded with competitors, but we're beating them because our service returns results in 78ms, while our competitors doing devops and running in Azure, etc. return in 2500ms.
That's because we have a dedicated ops team who concentrate on performance and scaling, and leave the devs to write code instead of managing servers.
Surely the devs focus on performance and scaling as well, if not at the level of managing servers? Having a dedicated ops team is a necessity, but it's important to keep developers in the loop on operations as well.
As the architect of the systems, I focus the designs on scalability and performance and the devs implement it. So, whether it's a dev or its an architect, someone has to be thinking about it. But having an ops background helps with knowing how to scale.
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I think this is a common fallacy.
To randomly pick an example - sure, automatic filesystem snapshots are a cakewalk these days, and a decade ago they were rather expensive. It seems logical to assume that things that we needed admins to do and rig up somewhat delicate systems for a decade ago are so easy now, we don't need people to focus on that...
This overlooks the fact that the baseline has just moved ahead. Sure you don't need dedicated people for stuff you used to.. but there is new stuff out there that your competitors are hiring dedicated people to work on and push the envelope. if you're okay with doing what you could have done 10 years ago, just using reduced staff, that's great - but it's not going to win you much.
Is operations really going to be a competitive advantage for you? If my startup lets you hail cabs from your smartphone, is an extra 9 of uptime really going to help me beat Uber?
My company's space is pretty crowded with competitors, but we're beating them because our service returns results in 78ms, while our competitors doing devops and running in Azure, etc. return in 2500ms.
That's because we have a dedicated ops team who concentrate on performance and scaling, and leave the devs to write code instead of managing servers.
Surely the devs focus on performance and scaling as well, if not at the level of managing servers? Having a dedicated ops team is a necessity, but it's important to keep developers in the loop on operations as well.
As the architect of the systems, I focus the designs on scalability and performance and the devs implement it. So, whether it's a dev or its an architect, someone has to be thinking about it. But having an ops background helps with knowing how to scale.