DevOps is not a Job

Introduction: The Persistent DevOps Misconception

Imagine stepping into an organization where a newly formed "DevOps team" sits in a corner, juggling scripts and automation, isolated from the rest of the company. The CTO proudly announces, "We've implemented DevOps!" Meanwhile, job postings flood the market for "DevOps Engineers" tasked with bridging development and operations, while consulting agencies eagerly supply CVs for these roles as if DevOps were simply another job title. Companies even contract "DevOps experts" to build teams, expecting quick results without a cultural transformation. Sound familiar?

DevOps remains widely misunderstood after years of discussions, literature, and practical applications. It is often confused with a specific role, a distinct team, or merely a collection of automation tools. However, DevOps is neither a team nor a job title nor solely focused on tooling. Instead, it represents a mindset, a culture, and a way of collaborating that fosters cooperation among development, operations, and, increasingly, security and finance to enhance efficiency, drive innovation, enable continuous delivery, ensure security, and manage costs.

So why does this misunderstanding continue? Are companies unclear about DevOps, or is there a more profound resistance to fully embracing the change it represents?

Today, numerous XOps exist (DevSecOps, MLOps, AIOps, FinOps, NetOps, DataOps, etc.).

1. DevOps as a Mindset, Not a Role

Misconception: The initial statement highlights that leadership incorrectly sees DevOps as merely an "Ops team with coding skills," or a "Dev team with Ops capabilities," or even as a separate entity. This perception contradicts the essence of DevOps, which is fundamentally about collaboration, integration, and breaking down silos.

Discussion: Why do organizations restrict DevOps to a specific role or team? Is it due to a misunderstanding of its true purpose, a belief that it can be a cost-saving measure by merging multiple skill sets into a single role, or is it driven by organizational inertia and the pressure to adopt 'DevOps' in name only?

2. Multi-Disciplinary Teams Are Crucial

Misconception: The initial statement highlights that leadership often sees DevOps merely as an "Ops team with coding skills" or a "Dev team with Ops capabilities," or even as a distinct group. This view contrasts sharply with the essence of DevOps, which revolves around collaboration, integration, and breaking down silos.

Discussion: Why restrict DevOps to a particular role or team? Does this result from misunderstanding its true purpose, or does it arise from organizational inertia or pressure to adopt "DevOps" superficially?

3. Practicality vs. Ideology

Reality Check: While DevOps is a mindset, applying it often requires pragmatic solutions, which may involve dedicated teams for operationalizing DevOps principles. This raises the question:

Discussion: How do we reconcile the ideal of "DevOps everywhere" with the need for specialists in architecture, data, development, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, networking, monitoring, security, budgeting, and compliance automation, not forgetting the need to scale in many cases?

4. Measuring DevOps Success

Key Point: Many organizations find it challenging to measure the impact of DevOps because they do not align on goals such as reduced lead time, increased deployment frequency, decreased change failure rates, security breaches, or operational cost savings.

Discussion: How do you measure success in DevOps adoption? Is it about cultural change, tooling, team structure, or all of the above?

5. Adopting the Right Practices

Clarification Needed: DevOps is not a single prescriptive framework but a collection of practices (e.g., continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and so forth). Adopting these should align with the organization's needs and capabilities instead of forcing them into an "Ops-like" team.

Brainstorm Topic: What specific practices have been most impactful in your context? How can these be prioritized based on their unique challenges?

Adding SRE to the Discussion

Definition of SRE:

• What is SRE?
  • Google’s Definition: SRE, or Site Reliability Engineering, is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to operations tasks to create scalable and reliable software systems. The focus is on improving reliability, automating repetitive tasks, and bridging the gap between development and operations.
  • SRE views reliability as a measurable product feature and uses concepts like Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets to balance reliability with innovation velocity.
• The Evolution of SRE and Its Role in DevOps:
  • Google’s Introduction of SRE:
    • Introduced by Google in the early 2000s, SRE evolved as a way to operationalize the DevOps philosophy with an engineering-focused approach. Instead of traditional system administration, SREs bring coding, automation, and operational expertise to create scalable infrastructure and ensure system reliability.
    • SRE builds on DevOps by formalizing key reliability practices and making them a core responsibility.
  • Key SRE Principles:
    • Treat operations tasks as software problems.
    • Automate repetitive manual tasks.
    • Use metrics like SLIs and SLOs to guide decision-making.
    • Apply error budgets to balance feature development and reliability goals.
• How SRE Fits into the DevOps Evolution:
  • DevOps as the Foundation:
    • DevOps set the stage by emphasizing collaboration, breaking down silos, and adopting practices like CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and automation.
  • SRE as the Practical Implementation:
    • SRE complements DevOps by focusing on reliability as a core engineering challenge. It codifies operational excellence into measurable objectives and provides frameworks to balance reliability with speed.
    • The SRE role also formalizes "operational ownership" with a strong engineering perspective, ensuring reliability concerns are addressed early and systematically.

Discussion Points for SRE vs. DevOps:

DevOps and SRE: Are They Mutually Exclusive?

While DevOps is a philosophy and set of practices, SRE is often seen as its implementation in high-reliability environments. Both aim to achieve similar outcomes—improved collaboration, automation, and reliability—but through slightly different lenses.

DevOps focuses broadly on cultural change and process integration, while SRE focuses on reliability as an explicit goal.

When to Introduce SRE?

• Discuss at what stage in an organization’s growth SRE becomes relevant. Is SRE more suited to large-scale systems with high-reliability requirements, or can its principles be applied universally?

Biggest Challenges of SRE Adoption:

• Debate the challenges of adopting SRE principles: finding talent with software and operations expertise, cultural resistance to error budgets, and ensuring that reliability frameworks don’t create bureaucracy.

Conclusion: Embracing the True Spirit of DevOps

The conversation around DevOps needs to shift from "Who owns DevOps?" to "How can we integrate DevOps principles into everything we do?"
Organizations can unlock the true potential of collaboration, agility, and innovation by recognizing DevOps as a mindset rather than a role, a team, or just a trend.

So, let’s discuss what DevOps means and how it can be adopted correctly.,