DevOps Engineers are Sexy Aren't We?

Cade Metz dropped a lot of nuggets in his article, "The Chef, the Puppet, and the Sexy IT Admin." I was going to quote several of these, but I recommend you just break down and read it if you have the time. Metz quotes Luke Kanies of Puppet, referring to the goal of his company saying, "The idea was that IT automation would be the basis for all really scalable startups - that it would become the secret sauce that everyone had." Today IT projects are mini-startups, on a project-by-project basis. The days of huge, monolithic, development pipelines are gone. Our society is increasing in both professional and personal productivity-we don't have time to wait around for innovative solutions to be delivered (i.e. "the value"). And as many of our daily work and home activities touch software intensive systems frequently, we need our code "fixes" nearly instantaneously (double entendre intended). This notion of Development + Operations (DevOps) does for operations, what Lean and Agile have done for software development. Puppet and Chef provide tools; albeit using different techniques (i.e. Ruby vs. DSL), that allow operational configurations to resemble an application scaffolding or plane-ole code.