Plumbers

I recently shared our experience in implementing DevOps during AWS Partner Conference.

It was a great experience for me, my team mates and the organization as the whole. It was probably a rather heroic to set up a platform from ground-up with the tools and platforms that were alien to us. However, we made it. We did learn many things and we also regretted many things, big and small.

During sharing, I mentioned that the future cloud engineers should not only focus on cloud infrastructure. To me, it is a given that someone who claimed to be a cloud engineer should know how to setup VMs, network and work on the VMs.

However, an organization needs more than that. If we simply do lift-and-shift, then there is not much value on shifting to the cloud. The whole cloud setup (and migration) is a failure.

We need to rearchitect the applications to be cloud-native, utilizing and exploiting cloud offerings. The cloud engineers need to know application development.

Security in the cloud is different from on-premise; in the cloud it may be easier to unintentionally to misconfigure a setting that may create security incident. We need someone who knows security.

DevOps is a must, even if the organization does not do in-house applications.  How to make the pipeline to support not only applications but also the infrastructure setup in the cloud. Treat the cloud setup as a code, that need to be reviewed, version controlled and tested. We need someone who knows DevOps.

Granted, there is nobody that can excel and master all domains. We need someone who excel in one or two domains with basic knowledge on other domains. The next cloud engineers must be a T-shaped professional.

With this kind of skills, we can fully utilize the cloud and bring the value to organization.

Perhaps I am asking too much, but this is what I see in the future. A specialization in certain domain or area won't be enough. Developers now need to know infrastructure and security. Infosec professionals could not pat themselves in the back knowing latest perimeter security, now they need to know programming and supply chain attack. Multi-skilled professional is the future.

On side note, I always call the DevOps team as plumbers. We are dealing with pipelines and one (of many) jobs we need to do is to remove any blocker or impediments to the pipeline, a kind of a plumber who need to unblocked a choked pipe. It also reflects the role we play (which sadly sometimes tend to be forgotten).

‘We can have as many philosophers in the world, but there won’t be any civilizations without the  plumbers’