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Notes -
I believe that when you, @curious_straight_ca, and now me talk about developer operators/devops/sre, we're all talking about different things. From talking with people, this part of the industry seems to be undergoing a complete headfuck of an identity crisis.
Many companies simply changed labels from "sysadmin" or "operations" to "devops" or "sre" and called it a day, with the people doing what they always did: maintaining hardware, producing an endless stream of small automation (bash scripts, yay), and managing LDAP/other access (your next post seems to describe this group). Some companies created a true group of automation developers--tool and systems makers. Yet others have formed groups inspired by manufacturing that are using statistical modeling methods to design and maintain systems.
What I think this points to is that the industry is struggling with the problem of reliability, specifically, reliable product delivery (availability, durability, latency, etc). Up until fairly recently, no one from the industry spent time to devise a production process(1) to produce reliable software, so it's pretty much a wild west composed of at least two dozen or more different groups trying to figure it out (or make money and disappear), all of them using the same two labels.
I'm urging caution because it seems there's a strong disconnect between map (job titles) and territory (job responsibilities) to the point where two people with the same title probably can't even communicate because they do vastly different things.
(1): I'm not counting tools like formal verification or Erlang ("nine nines")--I'm thinking of the whole process including people, skillsets, organization, etc.
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