This is a rant that has been building up for a while, so if you are strongly opinionated maybe you should move on to the next blog post and skip this one…
It is my opinion that it is time for the “next” buzzword to start making its appearance in IT. Maybe we should call it Tom, or maybe COD (Container Orientated Development); ooh what about DevCon (Development Containers), you know ‘cause containers is one of the things right now.
Anyway, let’s not get side-tracked. DevOps is one of those things that most people do not understand, but everyone wants a finger in the pie. Unfortunately, vendors probably have a lot of blame in this field, supplying DevOps services and practitioners, throwing DevOps into every second sentence. I kid you not, I was in a meeting last week where a “DevOps” vendor was literarily interchanging CI (Continuous Integration) with DevOps: “I have the build setup for CI, you know DevOps”. Wonder what Donovan Brown would say about that… It is like people that religiously follow a Banting Diet and yet still consumes loads of beer. They do not understand the principles, or what they are supposed to be doing, and/or why they are supposed to be doing it!
Execs hear the world speaking about DevOps and they want themselves a piece of that pie. So the first person/vendor that comes along and throws in the words at strategic places gets the jobs.
I had a discussion today with a client that is “big” into the DevOps thing. They want to remove all rights from developers to be able to branch their Git repositories. In my mind that goes against the two, largely unspoken, aspects of DevOps namely People and Process. Sure the Tool will be able to do branching and remove rights from groups of people, but won’t losing the ability to branch when needed impede the process of agility and cause the people to be unproductive while they are trying to slash red tape and justify the creation of new branches?
Getting back to my initial point; There are a few strong voices that barely reach out above all the noise around DevOps, and they talk a good talk. If you look back over IT’s (short) history you notice that once the big self-serving hordes have moved on to the “next” thing, then the die-hards can get to bedding down concepts and approaches. Look at scrum, ALM, a lot of developer practices. I realise that this means that as a vendor myself, I will find it harder to stay afloat, but for my own sanity maybe it is worth it!
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