What is the difference between SysOps and DevOps?
Traditionally, businesses relied on hiring testers, DBAs, developers, network & system engineers and operators to run a successful systems operation. However, with the arrival of cloud computing, things have simplified for the development and admin teams. Nowadays, a cloud enabled organization can cut back 20% of a DBA’s work, 50% of a system admin’s work and over 80% of a network engineer’s work.
This change forced system administrators to find newer avenues for their talent. In response, they shifted to aiding development of business centric applications, giving birth to a new category, the DevOps.
DevOps and SysOps are two mainstays of cloud computing. DevOps uses a continuous delivery model under which teams develop, write, test, and release application software in short time cycles. DevOps relies heavily on automation to make time cycles shorter and the releases more stable. On the other hand, SysOps delivery style is derived from a thorough set of guidelines for IT service management. The aim is to align business goals and IT services of an organization, and SysOps provides a baseline from where the design, execution and measurement can proceed.
There are five key things you can compare while building an application to decide between DevOps and SysOps.
- Estimated load
- Execution speed requirements
- Application adaptability to unforeseen changes
- Scaling speed when traffic is high
- Frequency of updates
In the end, choosing between the two is a matter of preference and requirements. While the DevOps way of managing infrastructure is taken care of by the latest automation tools, the SysOps configurations are centralized around infrastructure, which is taken care of at individual levels. Here is a table to help you understand the key differences between the two.
In conclusion, it can be said that DevOps is the more contemporary of the two systems. More organizations are shifting to Cloud and DevOps offers a veritable alternative to SysOps in terms of product development and innovation.