The rebranding is cute and all, and the tooling's a fair bit better, but nothing I've seen suggests that combining these two full-time roles in the same people is any more a good idea today than it was fifteen years ago.
All things being equal (i.e. I've got the money to have someone who's role is more ops than dev but still does both) having that person to "own" the production configuration is valuable, but developers still need to be in touch with what their code does in production. Otherwise you eventually end up with the equivalent of a cool interaction design that's damn near impossible to implement on the web (another pet peeve of mine...)
The inherent failing in this structure is when one of two things happens; one, the system administration team does not have the appropriate channels (and clout) to provide push back against the engineering team; two, the technical teams (both engineering and system administration) don't have the ability to get technical debt payed off properly due to an improperly structured project management process.
Anecdotally, I've been witness to the second issue a number of times. If there isn't an immediate understanding of ROI for a proposed change then it isn't prioritized to be worked on. The thought process is generally along the lines of, "Engineers are an expensive resource, having them working on something that won't make the company money is obviously not the priority."
While some of this is on the engineering leadership as their job is to provide insight into ROI for technical matters there also needs to be a balance where the non-technical leadership trusts the technical leadership to know when to prioritize projects with non-obvious ROI.
Some places just rebrand administration as devops. Shiny new title for you, stakeholders can be told we're not missing the trendy new hotness, carry on.
Some places will pull in a "devops person" and drop them on the IT team. This seems to usually result in something between "Jenkins? The devops guy sites over there" and incremental improvements.
Better than that is the model where the "devops person" is something of a liaison as well as an individual contributor - they sit in engineering standups, collaborate on how things are going to be built with an eye towards deployment and manageability, and generally play both sides of the fence. This, however, requires a "devops person" who is also a bit of a politician, and that's not usually contemplated when hiring. It also requires engineering to let the person meaningfully take part, which can become even more political some places.
Best, in theory, is more of less of a merger, but that does ignore that IT is a very different beast than engineering, and that the workplace has been dealing with the distinction for a very long time. Changing that is not a technical issue, it is a (big) management and perception issue. If you get it wrong, the power balance gets wonky and causes the usual problems when you have managers who are IT-clueless managing IT people[1].
All that said, and putting aside org-chart and political issues, I like to think two things are true:
- That someone who has done both engineering and administration is more likely to spot friction, second-order effects, and various traps and dead ends than someone who hasn't.
- That treating the various "devopsy" things - deployment, integration, monitoring, etc. as first-class requirements alongside product features leads to better results along multiple dimensions.
So it reduces to people-problems. There just aren't many folks who have lived on both sides of the fence who also want to do this sort of role[2]. And if you adopt "devops" as a cost-savings measure, you're doomed up-front.
[1] You never see IT managers promoted over engineering, for obvious reasons. The reasons why the reverse happens are obvious to me in descriptive terms, but not in normative terms.
[2] Of course, keep in mind that I'm in this category. I don't write this as ego fluffing - I believe these things to be true - but here's my disclaimer.
me@homebox $ for host in foo bar baz; do cat random_stuff_who_knows_if_it_works.sh | ssh $host 'bash -'; done
But yeah, I agree that Ansible is the minimum that should be in place.
Oh, Python is quite old already :)
That said, immutable configuration is static, so the need for grumpy admin style scripts did not go away. It just reduced.
I had used very readable and documented scripts that would build images, boot VMs, deploy on physicals, configure network devices with hundreds of SLOC by simply calling the right CLI tools instead of (re)writing many thousands of lines in $language.
I was in a company around 2002 doing immutable deployments by updating images from git-tracked config files for whole datacenters.
E.g. calling to debootstrap takes few lines. Generating an ISO. Configuring PXE to serve it...
As a funny non-example: https://github.com/p8952/bocker