“$thing is dead!” is one of the more annoying memes in the world of technology. A Tech Crunch article back in April claimed that managed services (of cloud infrastructure) is the death knell of DevOps. I dislike the article for a variety of reasons, but I want to focus on why the core argument is bunk. Simply put: “the cloud” is not synonymous with “magical pixie dust.” Real hardware and software still exist in order to run these services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the current undisputed leader in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space. AWS probably underlies many of the services you use on a daily basis: Slack and Netflix are two prime examples. AWS offers dozens of services for computation, storage, and networking that roll out updates to datacenters across the globe many times a day. DevOps practices are what make that possible.
Oh, but the cloud means you don’t need your internal DevOps team! No. Shut up. “Why not simply teach all developers how to utilize the infrastructure tools in the cloud?” Because being able to spin up servers and being able to effectively manage and scale them are two entirely different concepts. It is true that cloud services can (not “must”!) take the “Ops” out of “DevOps” for development environments. But just as having access to WebMD doesn’t mean I’m going to perform my own surgery, being able to spin up resources doesn’t obviate the need for experienced management.
The author spoke of “managed services provider” as an apparent synonym for “IaaS provider”. He ignored what I think of as “managed services” which is a contracted team to manage a service for you. That’s what I believe to be the more realistic threat to internal DevOps teams. But it’s no different than any other outsourcing effort, and outsourcing is hardly a new concept.
At the end of the article, the author finally gets around to admitting that DevOps is a cultural paradigm, not a position or a particular brand of fairy dust. Cloud services don’t threaten DevOps, they make it easier than ever to practice. Anyone trying to convince you that DevOps is dead is just trying to get you to read their crappy article (yes, I have a well-tuned sense of irony, why do you ask?).