back to article DevOps hype? Sometimes a pizza really is just a pizza

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Four friends are sitting on a sofa, and one says to the others, “I’m hungry, I want to learn how to make pizza.” The first friend responds: “90 per cent of my fiends who ate pizza in 2016 were 80 per cent less hungry.” The second: “I can make you pizza, 30 per cent quicker and 10 per …

  1. TRT Silver badge

    So... really... you want it plain and simple.

    Ah! You're asking for a Margherita then. Excellent. Well, if you take the 9" you can get a second one for half price. Or opt for a 12" for £7 but that's collect only. Unless you take The Works (tm) and then use the customise option to delete the peppers, olives, pepperoni etc. That could work out a little more though.

    1. K

      Re: So... really... you want it plain and simple.

      Four friends sitting round a table, one pips up and says "I want to work in DevOps"... The other three are seasoned IT professionals reply:

      • So you want to be a UI developer?
      • So you want to be a back-end developer?
      • So you want to be a infrastructure administrator?
      • So you want to be a network engineer?
      • So you want to to be a security engineer?
      • So you want to to be a database administrator?
      • So you want to to be a support administrator?

      Suddenly a consultant barges through the door and says: No, that's old-school and obsolete. Methods of continuous delivery means in-depth expertise in specific fields is no longer required, convergence is order of the day. He wants a role that synergies and leverages these, to deliver a paradigm shift. (Then proceeds to submit an invoice, followed by a quick exit stage left)!

      1. John 104

        Re: So... really... you want it plain and simple.

        @K

        You summed it up nicely there. All those hats can't be work by one skill set, but managers see an opportunity for reduced head count and tun to it. Then point fingers at others when it doesn't work...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The noun for a thing that has been learned is a lesson. Not a "learning."

    1. Unep Eurobats
      Flame

      Re: learning

      I think you mean 'key takeaway'. Which reminds me, we never got the punchline of the pizza story.

      (Mine's the one from the wood-fired oven ->)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Easy. Pizza can be outsourced.

    Let someone else worry how to make pizza and phone Dominos.

    Of course it will be poor quality, late, not be what you really wanted and be more expensive, but that's outsourcing for you.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Easy. Pizza can be outsourced.

      Dominos is not now, and never has been, pizza. Dominoes is to pizza as 'DevOps" is to advancing technology ... soggy, murky, everywhere and flavo(u)rless.

  4. Alistair

    Devops and agile still have not changed the three.

    1. Cheap

    2. Right

    3. Fast

    choose 2.

    much like pizzas.

  5. Steve Button Silver badge

    Stock Photos!?

    Yeah, don't you just hate them. Wait... what's that at the top of the article?

    And pretty much every fucking Reg article. Dumb stock photo.

    Like the one I'm looking at in your "spotlight" bar on the right. Man in suit, typing on a laptop sitting on top of a giant cartoon style bomb. ha ha ha ha. So funny. I get the metaphor, but please just stop it.

    It's like using clip art in the 90's. Lots of people did it, but that didn't stop it being cheesy.

  6. Erik4872

    Best summary of the current state so far

    Stock photos indeed, including large centered bold tagline...it's like someone manufactured a DevOps Startup Kit and every single 3 person team has a web presence that makes them look like a massive fully supported product.

    The problem is that there's nothing wrong with the concept of DevOps. Developers and IT need to work together -- we in IT can't just be the Department of No. The main problem with it is that the Second Dotcom Bubble has been inflating for the last few years, coinciding with the DevOps shift. Useful information barely gets heard over the screams of "agile single pane of glass!" Everything's an automation framework, a cloud-based analytics platform, etc. because that's what's driving the phone and app ecosystem. Startups need big data in the cloud to monetize the info generated from their fart app. :-)

    Just like the First Dotcom Bubble brought us much improved Internet access and services out of its ashes, I think that reasonable levels of cloud computing adoption and DevOps without the hype and snake-oil tool salesmen will be what we get from this one.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It is hype

    Hype and you know it is. Jack of all trades IT professionals.. wow, so new.. SME IT people have been doing that for ever..

    When I started seeing Ads on Linked in.. I just went YAWN.. Another fad..

  8. a_yank_lurker

    Uncle Bob's comments

    Uncle Bob Martin has a Youtube video about history of programming. One thing he notes was in the old days (pre mid 70s) most IT professionals were seasoned professionals who wandered in from other fields. They had skills and maturity that he notes is often sad lacking in many IT companies. He also noted that agile type methods were commonly used by these old timers. What they did differently was to realize projects have different natural rhythms rather than have "scrums" (idiotic term if you know rugby) and 2-week "sprints" because some insultant said that is how it is done.

    DevOps seems to have the same problem, insultants who have a "magically" method to solve all your problems but never do.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    to me the plan do .... act line of doing things is just a servo mechanism, that's really old technology, perhaps put in practice by people who want to tell other people how to improve (insultants?)

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    I hate to use the Simpsons as a reference, but

    "Marge vs. The Monorail" springs to mind.

    1. Joe Drunk

      Re: I hate to use the Simpsons as a reference, but

      That or "Better Off Ted - Jabberwocky". Because it's going to change the way we do business.

  11. teebie

    "These days it takes me longer to find accurate information"

    So you took 20 paragraphs to say .. I'm not sure exactly what.

    Are you *definitely* helping the situation?

  12. handleoclast
    Coat

    Unfographic

    I don't know if it was a typo (the "u" and "i" keys are adjacent) or a deliberate neologism, but I think "unfographic" is a brilliant description of shitty infographics that actually tell you fuck all.

    A new one for the lexicon.

    1. andy 103

      Re: Unfographic

      I think it's very much an intended way of spelling it, and you have worked out the meaning all by yourself. Well done have a cookie.

  13. TheMeerkat

    Learning to make a pizza is not a solution to a problem "I am hungry". This is why the responses were the way they were. The solution is to get food quickly.

    Even we try to solve a problem of fixing the future hunger, "learning to make a pizza" is also not an optimal solution as there are other simpler ways to make food that can fix "I am hungry" problem.

    Generally the example is very much describes why DevOps is just people following the hype and not the best solution for majority of companies that are trying to implement DevOps.

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