This article is myopic in that it fails to mention the premises only (mostly) work for web-only startup companies relying heavily on cloud computing for everything. And even then, only the ones that don't see operational/infrastructure efficiency as a differentiator. If you take those constraints into account, it makes a lot of sense: just ask your developers to learn the very basics of those 3rd-party services you signed up to and things will go fine.
A developer will just be making sure he/she uses the logging provider API, that their 3rd-party monitoring and alerting system is updated, the automatic third-party load balancer has a little checkbox saying backend monitoring is configured, etc. Behind those magic services there will be your traditional Ops people (now better equipped with automation tools) making sure everything is running smoothly, properly sized, monitored and troubleshooted when it fails (it WILL fail, in unexpected ways, more often than you'd like).
People parroting "Ops-less" and "Server-less" buzzwords seem to be so detached from the daily activities required to maintaining real-world computing systems that they forget it exists. It's really frustrating when the SV zeitgeist living in a distorted reality (or a very narrow one) proposes this is the way things are or will certainly be in the near future. You just need to skim over all the GitHub issues in these magical tools (or countless articles with workarounds for all sorts of issues) to learn things aren't that simple as they pretend to be (which is fine, things take a lot of time to mature).
The work is not changing (except for increased automation everywhere), it's just shifting to third-parties or far away teams in your own company.
If only the computing world was that dreamy. I'll think about that next time I spent a day analyzing packets with tcpdump, coming up with a patch for a basic flaw in some tool, profiling some code that is destroying the storage system, etc. Yeah, that won't be distracting at all for developers. Maybe they don't need to work on their team's core competencies. Everything will "just" work. </sarcasm, sorry>
A developer will just be making sure he/she uses the logging provider API, that their 3rd-party monitoring and alerting system is updated, the automatic third-party load balancer has a little checkbox saying backend monitoring is configured, etc. Behind those magic services there will be your traditional Ops people (now better equipped with automation tools) making sure everything is running smoothly, properly sized, monitored and troubleshooted when it fails (it WILL fail, in unexpected ways, more often than you'd like).
People parroting "Ops-less" and "Server-less" buzzwords seem to be so detached from the daily activities required to maintaining real-world computing systems that they forget it exists. It's really frustrating when the SV zeitgeist living in a distorted reality (or a very narrow one) proposes this is the way things are or will certainly be in the near future. You just need to skim over all the GitHub issues in these magical tools (or countless articles with workarounds for all sorts of issues) to learn things aren't that simple as they pretend to be (which is fine, things take a lot of time to mature).
The work is not changing (except for increased automation everywhere), it's just shifting to third-parties or far away teams in your own company.
If only the computing world was that dreamy. I'll think about that next time I spent a day analyzing packets with tcpdump, coming up with a patch for a basic flaw in some tool, profiling some code that is destroying the storage system, etc. Yeah, that won't be distracting at all for developers. Maybe they don't need to work on their team's core competencies. Everything will "just" work. </sarcasm, sorry>