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Puppet: A world without operators in IT Operations?

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Kelsey Hightower, Principal Engineer at Google Cloud and Deepak Giridharagopal, co-CTO and Chief Architect at Puppet started their on-stage conversation during Puppetize Digital, with this main thought:

Are we any closer to a world without operators?

After all, if the end game for IT operations is automation, then what will it take for tech to become so sophisticated that it basically manages itself?

When we look at internal IT departments in an organisation and all the roles within that function, there are two large buckets to think about – the IT folks that handle hardware and the other IT folks that manage the software.

Have their roles evolved?

“I think throughout my career, there has always been this loop of how do you improve, or replace the old thing and ensure the new thing is suitable. And that’s kind of where I land in Puppet, attempting to automate all those things away.”

“That’s where I got the idea, all this is just a means to an end, and I shifted focus to ‘what are people trying to accomplish.’

“Throughout the career of an IT person, Kelsey opined that one may eventually work on a team ‘big enough and where everyone won’t be technical, but those (non-technical) people still need to be able to make decisions and control when things happen. For example,. when a version of software is ready to go to production.'”

That had happened to Kelsey and he shared that when it did, he was able to step back and ask – even though there were all these automation tools, what were the right tools and interfaces to expose to these none-to-less-technical people, so they could be as productive as someone comfortable with programming?

“That’s where I got the idea, all this is just a means to an end, and I shifted focus to ‘what are people trying to accomplish.’

The idea of using automation, instead of trying to teach everyone a command line tool, also starts to emerge, Kelsey said.

Pre-DevOps

Deepak drew on his own experiences to share about two ‘universes’ he noticed – the ‘active’ side the and classic system administrators side – these existed before DevOps became well-known.

He explained, “There’s a technical crew that doesn’t necessarily have a full appreciation for what it takes to rack and stack everything and actually make something ready to run.

“But then on the other side, you had people that would benefit from automation through the use of software development practices and things like that.

“So, I thought that was a really interesting opportunity to intersect (the two universes).”

He explained, if an IT professional was only interested in tools to help them manage configurations for infrastructure, for example, the scope may start to expand. The config management was not the end goal anymore, but became the means to another bigger end goal.

Deepak noted that the end goal for a lot of people started to be things like how to deliver software more quickly, how to make things more secure, how to bring new systems and stuff like that online more predictably, and quicker than before.

If an IT professional was only interested in tools to help them manage configurations for infrastructure, for example, the scope may start to expand. The config management was not the end goal anymore, but became the means to another bigger end goal.

What are people and businesses trying to accomplish?

The co-CTO shared how during his time at Puppet, the DevOps landscape evolved.

Conversations shifted from how to manage config management tools, to how to do DevOps, to now, how to reduce software delivery times with compliance.

Hopefully we’re all thinking about that the next 1 million developers shouldn’t necessarily have to start over!

All these did not happen overnight, and granted a lot of blood, sweat, and tears had gone into developing the DevOps culture to what it is today.

Kelsey said, “Ideally, we give everyone who wants to build stuff the ability to do so without having to learn everything we learned over the last 40 years, before they get started. Hopefully we’re all thinking about that the next 1 million developers shouldn’t necessarily have to start over!

A big, bright, shiny, world with operators (still)

Kelsey made the following interesting observation that the IT industry and culture has matured, and shared his view there is opportunity for more progress.

“Now, that we have all of these various approaches – they’re all transparent, open source projects, there’s white papers, there’s so many people working in a more communal fashion, there’s less proprietary software in the infrastructure space than there were 10 years ago.

After all, if the end game for IT operations is automation, then what will it take for tech to become so sophisticated that it basically manages itself?

“I think about that we’ve consolidated around this concept of open, so that means we have more people collaborating, and sharing unique ideas. Even where I work at Google, we’ve gone from white papers to open source projects. So we’re in (projects) using the exact same tools as everyone else,” Kelsey concluded.