Hi, I’m grouchy and I work with operations and data and backend stuff. I spent 3.5 years helping Parse grow from a handful of apps to over a million. Literally building serverless before it was cool TYVM.
So when I see kids saying “the future is serverless!” and “#NoOps!” I’m like okay, that’s cute. I’ve lived the other side of this fairytale. I’ve seen what happens when application developers think they don’t have to care about the skills associated with operations engineering. When they forget that no matter how pretty the abstractions are, you’re still dealing with dusty old concepts like “persistent state” and “queries” and “unavailability” and so forth, or when they literally just think they can throw money at a service to make it go faster because that’s totally how services work.
I’m going to split this up into two posts. I’ll write up a recap of my talk in a sec, but first let’s get some things straight. Like words. Like operations.
WHAT IS OPERATIONS?
Let’s talk about what “operations” actually means, in the year 2016, assuming a reasonably high-functioning engineering environment.
