DevOops, some common anti-patterns
Having ops teams around is essential in bigger companies but I&#x27;ve seen them turn into disablers instead of enablers as well. The devops movement was born out of frustration with that inertia.<p>I witnessed AWS creeping into Nokia ten years ago. This did not go down well with internal ops initially. They did not realize they were part of the problem instead of the solution. They were a huge cost bottleneck and also a source of huge time delays and pointless bureaucracy.<p>Ultimately a lot of what they did stopped being a thing. Resources they controlled (e.g. firewalls between data centers, storage clusters, vms, etc.) were replaced by IAAS. This turned out to be magnitudes faster, cheaper, and more reliable (e.g. storage cluster outages were a regular thing).<p>Small organizations don&#x27;t require dedicated ops teams anymore. If (dev)ops is done done well, ops is just not a full time job anymore. However, letting development teams do their own ops requires hiring people with ops skills as well as developer skills: i.e. devops people. So, not an anti pattern and it is perfectly valid to make sure that all teams have enough ops skills in the team. Also, these days I would expect senior developers to be not completely helpless doing ops. I don&#x27;t expect them to like it but I do expect some rudimentary skills.<p>So,hiring, people with devops skills is not an anti-pattern. I&#x27;d actually argue having an ops team at all is an anti-pattern unless you are big enough to justify needing one. And if you don&#x27;t have one, not hiring people with relevant skills would be a big anti pattern as well.<p>I&#x27;ve been around long enough to have seen most of what ops used to be about automated away or replaced by IAAS style deployments or otherwise no longer relevant. IMHO this is an ongoing thing and there is still a lot of non trivial stuff involved. A lot of time is still wasted on what is fundamentally tedious, repetitive, and error prone business of reinventing the same wheels over and over. It still seems way too hard to push out bog standard web applications in a way that results in responsible deployments with all the boxes ticked regarding security, ease of use, logging, auditing, etc. For me devops is a necessary evil. The less time I can spend on it the better. But the reality is that it still requires skills and time.