Recycled Bullsh-IT

According to the FinOps Foundation (made up of companies selling cloud budget management solutions), we are paying too much for cloud services. Well, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t say: No Sh*t, Sherlock. As I mentioned in Avoiding a Cloud Di-XaaS-ter and The Customer is ‘king Furious, our cloud suppliers are in the business of making money, particularly from our ignorance and stupidity in not controlling our cloud usage.  As the bean-counters get increasingly alarmed at the skyrocketing IT costs, some discipline around cloud cost containment wouldn’t go amiss.

But FinOps is just another in the current vogue of prefixing -Ops with something clever and pronounceable, to make clever pronouncements. So, here’s my guide to which -Ops are Tops and which are Flops:

SysOps

Back in the dawn of computing, the primitive and temperamental mainframes needed handling with kid gloves to keep them going. This was provided by System Operators (SysOps), who had to literally handle the I/O for the computer (magnetic tapes drives, punched paper tape, card decks, and concertina printout paper). Later the term SysOps was used for those poor souls who had to handle primitive and temperamental forum members on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Now normally called SysAdmins or Moderators.

DevOps

You may be most familiar with the term DevOps, which appeared in 2008 as a way to bridge the perceived gap between development (code/deploy/run!) and operations (“all change is evil”). This became particularly acute with the rise of the cult of agile, where the dev desire for daily deployment clashed with obstinate operations optimum option of occasional outages. DevOps has crested the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is currently dribbling down towards the Trough of Disillusionment, as people struggle to put in place the tools and techniques to prevent a total meltdown.

SecOps

One of the missing pieces for DevOps is the integration of security practices through the accelerated Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) that comes with agile & DevOps. Some DevOps fanatics see their cyber security colleagues as the enemy, always saying no to change. The reverse view of DevOps as cowboy coders probably doesn’t help. More cross-team collaboration and better automated security tasks is leading to the operationalisation and hardening of the security for the apps.  Try to avoid the horrible DevSecOps tag that is doing the rounds. Or NetOps, DBAOps, etc.

NoOps

As with coding, going through its own religious wars with low-code and no-code factions, DevOps is already being challenged (or if I’m being kind, supplemented) by NoOps. This isn’t a free-for-all approach, but one based on abstracting and automating the infrastructure management, maintenance and deployment with specialist tools. Theoretically this would do away with a need for the operations team, but as we old fogeys know, it’s still useful to have real brains around when you hit the known & unknown unknowns that Donald Rumsfeld warned us about.

WhoOps

Of course, we could just muddle on with our confused, warring and ultimately company-risking operational omnishambles (AKA WhoOps) for app development & deployment. But with increasingly frequent outages, data breaches and ransomware blackmailing, our heads will suffer ChOps and LOps if our apps flOps. Whoops!

John “MilksOps” Moe