Episode three, aired July 23, 2020, tackles one of the most misunderstood terms in IT. Brandon and I both came at DevOps from different timelines, and that contrast made for a good episode. He had been running what was essentially a DevOps shop at a startup years before the term existed or the Phoenix Project was even published. I was the one who needed convincing, and the book that converted me gets a real shoutout in this episode. Reading it was one of the actual turning points in my career.
We focused the conversation on automation specifically, since DevOps as a whole is too big to cover in thirty minutes. Brandon broke down continuous integration and continuous delivery from the developer side, the discipline of merging code frequently and keeping it always in a deployable state. I covered infrastructure as code from the operations side, including a genuinely embarrassing story about a “version control” system that consisted of appending an underscore and a number to the end of config filenames. It worked great until someone forgot to copy the file before editing it, and then you lost both your working copy and your rollback at the same time.
The part of this episode I think holds up best is the myth-busting around job security. A lot of people assume infrastructure as code and automation exist to replace systems administrators. We argued the opposite: automation does not eliminate the on-call phone, but it filters out the noise so the calls that do come through actually matter. Sysadmins become automation and infrastructure experts, which makes them more valuable, not less.
Listen to Sudo Show Episode 3: DevOps and Automation
We also use this episode to outline what is coming next: a look at advancing your career in tech, followed by a new arc on cloud architecture and building infrastructure with the future in mind. DevOps became one of the structural pillars of the whole show from here forward.