back to article DevOps is for all, says DevOps pundit-in-chief. He doesn't have it in for the BOFH, honest

One of the architects of DevOps has said being a 900-year-old organisation with a mainframe is no barrier to overhauling your technology operations, even if you're a European outfit that hasn’t seen a green field development since the 19th century. However, Gene Kim, author of DevOps cult classic The Phoenix Project, did give …

  1. BoldMan

    > Kim, speaking to us ahead of his debut conference in the UK, The DevOps Enterprise Summit, accepted this, saying: “So much of the narrative is around the unicorns – Google, Facebook, Amazon.” talking bollocks to morons who know even less about development than your average PHB

  2. disgruntled yank

    Gurus, acolytes, and miraculous changes

    No doubt his work is a cult classic.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    FTFY

    So, Kim will feel his mission is complete when The Reg feels compelled to retire the BOFH everybody adopts this snake oil so there won't be need for more ads disguised as articles, training, books, seminars and no more income from gullible PHBs? “Oh, I would never do that…”

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    missed the point of BOFH

    BOFH is not about the systems used, it's the people, te.g. he PHBs and their ilk that cause grief & require a roll of carpet & some quick lime treatment from BOFH & PFY.

    Or in the magical DevOps world are all managers suddenly competent, & coercion to e.g fix a Trojaned non company laptop of bosses brother, mate, mistress whatever suddenly stops

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: missed the point of BOFH

      It's not even the people. The BOFH is angry as a matter of principle.

  5. Known Hero

    THE STORY IS A LIE

    There is me ohhh an early BOFH about to trash the whole dev ops bullshit !!!

    NO NO NO

    Why would you do this, I suppose in your spare time you run round telling kids Santa isnt real !?!?

  6. chivo243 Silver badge
    Devil

    When has the BOFH missed a Junket

    with drinks and the chance to "Meet and Greet" this guy. Pretend to fall asleep in the front row and talk in your sleep or snore very loudly.

    Help me out here guys!

  7. IHateWearingATie

    I like Agile... but it aint a magic bullet.

    Currently working at a multi-national helping them dig a large IT project out of the ditch it had been run into. Agile has a place in parts of the programme, but is resolutely NOT ALLOWED in other parts depending on the suitability of the methodology to either what needs to be done or the people involved (or both).

    Its nice to hear someone being sensible about the constraints most of us work in with big corporates. Techno-utopianism is fine, but I bet those who espouse DevOps as the saviour to all our development ills haven't had teams foisted upon them whose average tech capability stopped evolving when the Apple II was released.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Agile != DevOps

      I like ham but I'm not a Hamster

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I suspect that the BOFH author might be better qualified to offer an opinion on the development vs. ops buckets as IIRC he is actually a software engineer!

  9. s. pam Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    He clearly doesn't realise...

    The BoFH is actually a guy in Audit.

    With a machete.

    DevOps is just because the little programmer kids couldn't get the mean, big bad SysAdmin to give them root.

    1. Fatman
      Joke

      Re: He clearly doesn't realise...

      <quote>DevOps is just because the little programmer kids couldn't get the mean, big bad SysAdmin to give them root on a VM that the SysAdmin can crash at any time the SysAdmin chooses.</quote>

      FTFY!!!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who Pays for DevOps?

    My company hasn't changed the way they fund projects. But now I have to figure out my OWN resource budget? Unlikely. Why would management want to fund a engineering project that has a line item for IT infrastructure? What does the company pay the IT department for? (their question, not mine)

    On legacy programs, you buy HARDWARE. I need X build machines, I buy X computers, bill them to capital, and call it a day. NOW I have to RENT VMs in a cluster offsite, PAY for resource and disk usage, and do that EVERY MONTH for the LIFE of my project (which could be 20+ years)? No thanks. (says the frugal manager)

    It might work for Google who already lives in the Cloud and never commits to anything for more than a few years (how long is any single service in Beta? It's ridiculous). Some of us live in the real world, and we can't just fire up another Docker container, not when we have to somehow attach $100k worth of real, physical test equipment to it. This makes it a lot more difficult to implement DevOps.

    1. John 104

      Re: Who Pays for DevOps?

      @AC

      On legacy programs, you buy HARDWARE. I need X build machines, I buy X computers, bill them to capital, and call it a day. NOW I have to RENT VMs in a cluster offsite, PAY for resource and disk usage, and do that EVERY MONTH for the LIFE of my project (which could be 20+ years)? No thanks. (says the frugal manager)

      Can I come work for you?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    xkcd

    With apologies to Randall Munroe and xkcd 1691 ...

    Are you holistically enacting the DevOps paradigm, or just taking the time to to do things right?

    -->

    Are you consulting a flowchart to answer this question?

    --Yes-->

    You are holistically enacting the DevOps paradigm

  12. phuzz Silver badge
    Joke

    I think you accidental cut off the end of one of those quotes, I think it should read:

    "The mind boggles at what could happen if HMRC was as efficient at extracting cash from taxpayers as Amazon is at avoiding them."

    FTFY

  13. swm

    I once worked for a large company making computer-controlled machines. Each subsystem of the machine would have its own controller which communicated with the other controllers over a proprietary bus. There was limited version control or centralized software oversight.

    I once pointed out to the head of software development of the company that I could do the entire software and hardware control with a single 8086 processor (these were the old days). There was a machine clock of about 10 milliseconds which timed everything and my argument was that I could execute over 1000 instructions in that 10 milliseconds so it shouldn't be that hard. All I needed was a list of the various states of the devices and sensors and the proper responses. The problem then revealed itself - no department in charge of a subsystem was willing to give up control of their software they were developing for political reasons. Owning the code was one way to maintain political power.

    Oh well.

  14. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "900-year-old organisation with a mainframe"

    First thing that popped up in my mind when reading this was "Vatican". Although it's actually much older, you could roughly double that figure, give or take.

    Anyway, my point is: if something works for a long, long time you might want to take a close look at it and find out why before you try something new just because it's fashionable right now.

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