Most of my work in DevOps isn’t in front of my text editor writing scripts. It’s spent hopping between dashboards, drafting emails, doing RCA, teaching dev team members how to use pipelines, and getting requirements from them for designing new pipelines. Then inevitably debating with them about design considerations when they ask for a set of procedures that won’t pan out.
Until your AI is a fully fledged team member who everyone can feel comfortable engaging with as if they were a real human, you cannot possibly begin to automate this.
Tried to figure out yesterday why a user couldn’t ssh into a server, tried LLMs to figure it out, completely useless. Had to go into some log file somewhere to find out the one who set up the server made a specific group for ssh and if a user wasn’t in that group they couldn’t connect. The LLMs (ChatGPT and Gemini) gave me bullshit about changing flags in the sshd config…
While the job does deal heavily in automating things, it only automates Boolean things. Looking at a platform and seeing why and where it’s failing is not a Boolean thing, and never will be. It’s the same reason we still don’t have machines that repair cars over 100 years after their introduction.
Exactly. DevOps engineers are already super skilled at using automation where appropriate, but knowing how and when to do that is still an extremely human task
DevOps is one of the most automated parts of software development and deployment actually.
Article seems like complete bullshit anyway.
Most of my work in DevOps isn’t in front of my text editor writing scripts. It’s spent hopping between dashboards, drafting emails, doing RCA, teaching dev team members how to use pipelines, and getting requirements from them for designing new pipelines. Then inevitably debating with them about design considerations when they ask for a set of procedures that won’t pan out.
Until your AI is a fully fledged team member who everyone can feel comfortable engaging with as if they were a real human, you cannot possibly begin to automate this.
Devops is often figuring out why automation didn’t work.
Absolutely, but that’s not an argument against what i said.
DevOps is not executing the automation, but designing it. DevOps is not manually spinning up pods but writing the automation that does so.
Tried to figure out yesterday why a user couldn’t ssh into a server, tried LLMs to figure it out, completely useless. Had to go into some log file somewhere to find out the one who set up the server made a specific group for ssh and if a user wasn’t in that group they couldn’t connect. The LLMs (ChatGPT and Gemini) gave me bullshit about changing flags in the sshd config…
Easy fix: give an LLM root access to all production critical servers and allow everyone in the company to chat with it.
First reaction: fear.
Second: I chuckled. Because I thought of some VP-level enforcing this joke as SOP.
And then a little more fear, as a treat.
Haha if that happens it is time to get out fast
…noooooo, it most definitely isn’t.
While the job does deal heavily in automating things, it only automates Boolean things. Looking at a platform and seeing why and where it’s failing is not a Boolean thing, and never will be. It’s the same reason we still don’t have machines that repair cars over 100 years after their introduction.
Exactly. DevOps engineers are already super skilled at using automation where appropriate, but knowing how and when to do that is still an extremely human task
Automation with a lot of validation steps that are not very obvious. Because if they were, we’d have automated them away.