The entire purpose of DevOps IMO was to close the gap between sysadmins and devs through code. Devs doing everything, including infrastructure, was and is the entire plan! Public cloud made this super duper easy.
The problem is devs don’t want to manage core infrastructure (VPCs, networking, modules for deploying lambdas and database clusters and container orchestration clusters, etc) and somebody has to do that stuff
Ideally, those would just be features like any other software team, as it’s all API calls at the end of the day. But lots of companies have issues with structuring their platform teams like software teams because its “not software” even though it is
This problem is more deeply entrenched at large companies with hundreds of millions of dollars of compute that they own that is owned by an old school IT function that can’t fathom the idea of either giving it up or making it accessible like cloud and would rather pay VMware tons for tools that make teams even slower than have their sysadmins become developers
Then there’s the whole protectionist “You’re taking my job” and “devs can’t possibly know this much about $infra” that isn’t dying off anytime soon
> Ideally, those would just be features like any other software team, as it’s all API calls at the end of the day. But lots of companies have issues with structuring their platform teams like software teams because its “not software” even though it is
Just because it's is implemented as API calls at the end of the day doesn't necessarily make it not "not software" (if you'll pardon the double negative), at least in the sense that I believe you mean.
To whit, I believe you're suggesting that if something can be expressed as code, it's all "software" and can therefore be designed, written, and maintained by the same kinds of experts, software developers.
I disagree, because the nature of the infrastructure-as-code code is too different from the application software code.
One could, similarly, express an FPGA configuration in code, but a software developer would not automatically be good at programming one. This is even likely to be true for less extreme examples, such as programming expertise not automatically transferring from general software (for lack of a betterm term) to code that works well on, say, GPUs.
In the case of IAC "software", a more mature design is more likely to resemble traditional sysadmin/network/security best practices than application software features. It could also have significant financial side effects if there's an error, assuming public cloud, which could require more stringent standards of control, review, and quality, especially if a company ends up in SOX territory.
>Then there’s the whole protectionist “You’re taking my job” and “devs can’t possibly know this much about $infra” that isn’t dying off anytime soon
I'm sure some of this exists, but my own experience is an attitude not that devs can't know a certain amount about infrastructure but that they simply don't, often because they actually don't want to.
Perhaps they fear that if they do end up knowing that much, they'll end up being the ones to manage that core infrastructure, which you indentified that they don't want to do!
The entire purpose of DevOps IMO was to close the gap between sysadmins and devs through code. Devs doing everything, including infrastructure, was and is the entire plan! Public cloud made this super duper easy.
The problem is devs don’t want to manage core infrastructure (VPCs, networking, modules for deploying lambdas and database clusters and container orchestration clusters, etc) and somebody has to do that stuff
Ideally, those would just be features like any other software team, as it’s all API calls at the end of the day. But lots of companies have issues with structuring their platform teams like software teams because its “not software” even though it is
This problem is more deeply entrenched at large companies with hundreds of millions of dollars of compute that they own that is owned by an old school IT function that can’t fathom the idea of either giving it up or making it accessible like cloud and would rather pay VMware tons for tools that make teams even slower than have their sysadmins become developers
Then there’s the whole protectionist “You’re taking my job” and “devs can’t possibly know this much about $infra” that isn’t dying off anytime soon
It’s complicated