Poor article, sorry.
Unfortunately, today's developers often aren't up to the challenge and frequently end up being as much of a roadblock as operations administrators.
I can only assume Potty works in the public sector, because pretty well every developer I know has been busily developing cloud solutions at home as research projects, due to the roadblock of management refusing to budge from the current way of doing things. The reason management are refusing to budge is simple: The ops admin team keep filling their head with scare stories about what will happen if we use “the cloud”, mostly due to a fear of loss of control and loss of employment. In reality, there’s zero reasons we couldn’t be using it for green field development work, given we never use production or sensitive data in a development environment.
Features must be added at a frightening pace and there is never enough time to do things right.
On the contrary, doing things right is what makes the time. A properly designed, written, and tested app should require very little hand holding or maintenance. The hard part is moving from doing things the wrong ways to doing them the right way – that takes time and effort that traditionally comes out of the developers social lives. It shouldn’t, but it does.
Security is viewed by both developers and operations as being constantly "in the way".
Security is something a professional developer designs and builds into their code from the ground up, or it never gets done. It’s pretty binary, because poor security is no security. What gets in the way are peoples pet projects masquerading as security, when in reality they add nothing of value to the security situation but do detract heavily from the productivity stream.
The server security isn't something a dev can or should be responsible for, save for being one side of the productivity:security see-saw. I don't know how to configure a windows server to be optimally secure, but I do know that there are features of Sql Server that I can leverage to significantly enhance productivity, even though that may push the DBA team out of their comfort zone - "What do you mean the assembly needs to be installed in the Sql Server - we don't know C#". I'm sure we can all think of other examples, both where the functionality is being abused, but also where locking things down has gone too far.
In a cloudy world you can't just jab a finger at operations and fob an angry suit off on the room of weird socially inept people down the hall.
What a strange view of world this is. On one hand it implies an alarming lack of professionalism from the developers the author has worked with, and on the other seems to denigrate all admins everywhere. Not all my devs or admins are socially inept. Far from it in some cases. Its an old, offensive, and frankly very dated stereotype that has no place in the modern industry.
The role of developers too is changing. Companies of all sizes depend on them now more than ever, and as cloud adoption - public, private and hybrid - increases, developers will take more direct control of the infrastructure their applications consume. In order to adapt, developers are having to learn to think differently. They have to become DevOps.
Not really, no. To summon the kind of infrastructure I need as a developer is pretty trivial. It requires none of the detailed knowledge of a competent sysadmin, none of their experience, as there’s not vast amounts of things I need to manage when looking at cloud for development. In reality, my organisation will never host our systems & data on other peoples computers, which is really all the cloud is. We will always require sysadmins who can deliver our requirements professionally – I don’t have to care about the patch state or backups on the server because everything of value is in my code repository, which is maintained by our in house admins.
How well Potty understands systems administration may be debateable, but he clearly doesn’t understand coding and software development very well at all. I think the vision of the future presented in this article will turn out to be wildly inaccurate, and that in 20 years time you’ll find we still need proper sysadmins, it’s just that the cloud will have made them a lot more pragmatic and responsive rather than the Dr No type who proliferate too often. Nobody should give a crap about the dev servers – they should be replaceable in an instant if the developers are doing things right, but the prod servers and datastores… they will always need careful and talented custodians. And that very much will not be us developers.