I can’t tell you how ripped I get when people say things like this:
“cloud computing means getting rid of ops”
If by “ops” you mean “people in data centers racking servers, installing OSes, running cables, replacing broken hardware, etc.” then sure, cloud computing aims to relieve you of those burdens. If you really think ‘ops’ is just that, then you really should put down your Nick Carr book and pay attention to the real world for a change.
The reality is, if your ops team is spending a lot of time doing that, then you’re either:
- Too big to use someone *else’s* cloud, because you basically have your own (Yahoo, Amazon, Google, etc.)
- Stuck in 1999.
If you deal with any of these things:
- handling site issues/incidents
- building and maintaining tools to monitor and gather systems and application-level metrics
- program abilities to adapt infrastructure to changing system or application-level conditions (usage, failure, degradation, etc.)
- implements, and maintains deployment systems (code, config management, etc.)
- capacity planning (no, really)
then you’re doing “ops”, by my definition. In some environments, these things are done by “developers”. But my definition says those devs are performing ops functions.
Cloud computing isn’t going to make ‘ops’ go away, it’s relieving of ops (and dev) of a bunch of pain-in-the-ass things so they can focus on the real work needed. Namely: your application.
Last I checked, clouds don’t perform the tasks listed above, because those things (done right) are application-specific. And while cloud computing enables (in an excellent way) the efficient resource allocation (or de-allocation) for an application, it doesn’t get rid of the need to do the above things.