Yes, it’s hyperbole. But the headline is important. In 2020 I still encounter companies who are moving into cloud, yet are immovable mired in their traditional way of doing IT. They are somehow convinced that a group of infrastructure folks build some things, some developers roll up, drop off some applications, and they are done. Worse are those that believe that they simply hand a set of tools to a team and call them DevOps because they’re using Chef, Terraform, or some such “automation” that makes it DevOps. When in fact all they are doing is putting lipstick on a pig.
What these organizations miss is that when you want to make your IT modern, you leave behind a siloed approach where things are thrown over a wall. You no longer have a bastion of operations that is saddled with unknown environments requiring full run-books and detailed operations manuals, and you no longer build infrastructure as a stand-alone function of IT that is separate from development.
You must be one! You must engineer! Not like an operations person, but in the way a developer engineers. He writes just what he needs to get the job/request done and move to the next task he’s been assigned. He thinks about how things fit together and builds constructs in his code to link his components together. He understands and runs test to make sure what he wrote does what he wants and needs it to do. If all of this is done under the right conditions (which means there is verification all is okay) then his code is ready to be pushed into production.
At this point you might be saying, that’s great for a developer, but not for infrastructure. My retort is that I *am* describing infrastructure. An Infrastructure Developer. And if you are working in cloud, anyone working on infrastructure had better be writing code. Any other pattern and you are repeating the sins of the past. They are now developers. If you are unable to recognize the error of not thinking this way, perhaps it’s time to step back from your mouse and GUI console and reconsider. Anything other than treating infrastructure as development of code risks making your environment untestable, unstable, unrepeatable, unrecoverable, and un-understandable. Sa think carefully. The world is now the world of developers and code. If you fail to recognize this and adapt, you risk succumbing to the real (r)evolution.
And just to be clear, I’m describing DevOps (in its proper, pure form). But because people have already taken to bastardizing and mis-using the term, I’m just going to slap you with some hyperbole.
