What It Is And Where It Came From

Adrian Cockcroft's article about NoOps at Netflix ignited a controversy that has been smouldering for some months. John Allspaw's detailed response to Adrian's article makes a key point: What Adrian described as "NoOps" isn't as a matter of fact. Operations doesn't go away. Responsibilities can, and do, shift over time, and as they shift, so do job descriptions. However no matter how you slice it, the same jobs need to be done, and one of those jobs is operations. What Adrian is calling NoOps at Netflix isn't all that different from Operations at Etsy. Yet that just begs the question: What do we mean by "operations" in the 21st century? If NoOps is a movement for replacing operations with something that looks suspiciously like operations, there's evidently confusion. Now that some of the passion has died down, it's time to get to a better understanding of what we mean by operations and how it's changed over the years.

The arrival of minicomputers in the 1970s

The arrival of minicomputers in the 1970s and PCs in the '80s broke down the wall between mainframe operators and users, leading to the system and network administrators of the 1980s and '90s. That was the birth of modern "IT operations" culture. Minicomputer users tended to be computing professionals with just enough knowledge to be dangerous.. PC users required networks; they required support; they required shared resources, just as file servers and mail servers. And yes, BOFH serves as a reminder of those days. I remember being told that "no one" else is having the problem you're having - and not getting beyond it until at a company meeting we found that everyone was having the exact same problem, in slightly different ways. No wonder we want ops to disappear. No wonder we wanted a wall between the developers and the sysadmins, particularly since, in theory, the advent of the personal computer and desktop workstation meant that we could all be responsible for our own machines.

Furthermore, as we move furthermore and furthermore away from traditional hardware servers and networks, and into a world that's virtualized on every level, old-style system administration ceases to work. Physical machines in a physical machine room won't disappear, nevertheless they're no longer the only thing a system administrator has to worry about. Where's the root disk drive on a virtual instance running at some colocation facility? Where's a network port on a virtual switch? Sure, system administrators of the '90s managed these resources with software; no sysadmin worth his salt came without a portfolio of Perl scripts. The difference is that now the resources themselves may be physical, or they may just be software; a network port, a disk drive, or a CPU has nothing to do with a physical entity you can point at or unplug. The only effective way to manage this layered reality is through software.

So infrastructure had to become code. All those Perl scripts show that it was already becoming code as early as the late '80s; truly, Perl was designed as a programming language for automating system administration. It didn't take long for leading-edge sysadmins to realize that handcrafted configurations and non-reproducible incantations were a bad way to run their shops. It's possible that this trend means the end of traditional system administrators, whose jobs are reduced to racking up systems for Amazon or Rackspace. However that's only likely to be the fate of those sysadmins who refuse to grow and adapt as the computing industry evolves. Good sysadmins have always realized that automation was a significant component of their job and will adapt as automation becomes furthermore important. The new sysadmin won't power down a machine, replace a failing disk drive, reboot, and restore from backup; he'll write software to detect a misbehaving EC2 instance automatically, destroy the bad instance, spin up a new one, and configure it, all without interrupting service. With automation at this level, the new "ops guy" won't care if he's responsible for a dozen systems or 10,000. And the modern BOFH is, as a rule, an old-school sysadmin who has chosen not to adapt.

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