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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Operations guys, "devops" as they are called now, remain the arch-wizards with grey beards. They love creating highly company-customized, incredibly complex, often times brittle infrastructure and deployments based on obscure scripts written in non mainstream languages based on plugins and libraries without documentation. The same opaqueness as in IT security, but in emergencies you can downsize/ignore IT security, but without the ops guys your product can not survive.

Kubernetes, Helm and cloud-platform specific quirks were a godsend that cemented in this status for at least another decade.

There is probably no job with higher job security in tech than this.

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So were it not for this era of cloud platforms and the other technical ”advancements” you mention, would we somehow be in a different place when it comes to maintaining and operating software?

As someone in a devops team, I could argue that ops teams are rarely the ones deciding what technologies to use. If we follow the basic sales->development->maintenance -pipeline, as ops your task is simply to keep the service running and secure with the tools you are given. Sure there can be added complexity, but I doubt it is as systemic/general as you make it seem to be.

Anyway, if this is seen as a problem the devs could simply take on the responsibility of learning those quirks themselves or produce the level of quality software that requires no maintanance whatsoever. But for some reason that hasn’t happened, eventhough the original idea behind devops was to blur this line. So until that day comes, I’ll sure enjoy whatever security one can really have in todays job market.

No, we would simply still use incomprehensible websphere setups. Now we got kubernetes as the application server of the current decade that's application language/framework agnostic.

But it shouldn't be like this. Devops shouldn't have to exist. Everything should work like heroku, where even mediocre devs can quickly setup proper pipelines.

Everything should work like heroku when you have heroku needs. Not everyone is just running web services.

> Kubernetes, Helm and cloud-platform specific quirks were a godsend that cemented in this status for at least another decade.

Quite to the contrary - containers and Kubernetes are standardizing and commoditizing builds, deployments and orchestration across different environments.

> There is probably no job with higher job security in tech than this.

Will the last person to leave please turn off AWS.

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