The Rise of the xOps– General Accountability in Today’s Technology Operations
In the past decade there has been an increase in the adoption of DevOps “mentality” in the normal course of business for many companies, tech and non tech as many have migrated to the cloud and embraced the agile methodologies and CI/CD pipelines.
The concept of DevOps, which combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops), has its roots in the early 2000s. However, the term “DevOps” was first coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer at the Agile 2008 conference. Since then, it attracted many followers and became almost a religion in the IT circuits. DevOps has become an integral part of modern software development and IT operations, with many companies adopting DevOps practices and tools to improve their delivery cycles and overall efficiency. Moreover, other areas of IT like security and networking started following the same concepts and SecOps, DevSecOps, NetOps and few more were born.
Taking an outsider look in the IT I noticed that instead of fostering a quicker cross-functionality/departmental integration, these DevOps started creating silos and finger pointing. If you needed a new application, you would open a ticket, the DevOps team will “spin” the VM or cluster, but then it will go to the NetOps and DevSecOps teams and they will have to do their thing or complain about something the DevOps did wrong, or whatever. The net result was that the intended nirvana of agility and speed using this methodology was being ripped apart by those silos. The “automated” process was actually very manual and operator specific at times, it is not that every team member can just jump in a process and take over.
I believed that this inevitable state of affairs will continue as such, until one of our customers, a research department of a very large car manufacturer reached to us for help. We were surprised that the signature of that person read “Software Application Developer” and that person was reaching to us asking help with setting up his network. After working with that person for few days I realized that there is a new breed of IT professionals that I will call them the xOps. This new breed of professionals are part of the generation that was born with highly automated systems (e.g. iPhones), know and expect to use sophisticated tools to do a lot of functions that they need in order to deliver what they need to deliver. They have enough information to understand what they want from other disciplines, but not to actually go to CLI. Their mentality is to GSD (get s… done) and do it quick, and not to bother with non-core (for them) functions.
There is a beauty in using technology to work for you and improve your quality of life, but not to be bothered by the enormity of that technology. Most of us (sorry Amish) are mobile users and I never find myself wondering about the eight or ten different protocols exchanged between my device and the cell tower or the wifi hotspot. I know that the device does it for me, so why should it be any different in enterprise and datacenter networking? Why do I need to set up all routing tables and I can have an orchestration platform does it for me in matter of minutes and no matter how many devices in the fabric.
In xOps what matters is the outcome, the speed it took to get it and the reliability of that outcome, all compared to the specific goals of that action.
Now let’s GSD!
Amir Elbaz
CEO & Founder, BE Networks
Amir has extensive experience in leading technology companies through key growth stages and has been advising companies on business strategy, financing and business development for over fifteen years.
