DevOps and Automation have certainly taken some mind share in the IT community and it seems to be becoming a universally accepted truth, that we need to automate operations in order to keep up with the rapid pace of development in the data center. There is clearly a trend of moving away from GUI based configuration, towards using the CLI (Command Line Interface), scripting and agile programming in order to achieve operational objectives in our environments. This is also evidenced in a seemingly ubiquitous substitution of job descriptions. The “System Administrator” role appears to be disappearing and a new “DevOps Engineer” role is supplanting it in many places. What’s unusual is that other than the job title, the job descriptions seem to be very much the same with additional scripting skills coming to the fore.
Even the King of the GUI, Microsoft, has seen this trend and with Windows Server 2012, dumped the Full Fat GUI approach in favour of using PowerShell as the primary point of interaction with the OS. Windows Server installs as the Core version (no GUI) by default now and it is expected that using a GUI would be the exception to the norm. I have to say that that’s not necessarily a bad thing, PowerShell is probably one of the initiatives that Microsoft has got right in recent years and those seem to be few and far between.
There are many obvious benefits to these text-based configuration approaches and it is inevitable things will continue in that direction. As workloads in the data center continue to become more transient with instances span-up and discarded frequently, it’s going to become a mandatory requirement to perform similar repeatable operations for many similar objects with scripting or similar tools.
Being around IT as long as I have though, I can’t help but wonder if this is just another “cycle”. It’s taken us 30 years to move away from the Centralised, Text Driven Mainframes of last century, but we are definitely heading back in that direction. IT tends to be cyclical in nature and I’d hazard a guess that once we’ve all got to grips with DevOps, there will be a new generation of graphical tools in the distant but imaginable future. We are after all a primarily visual species. If and when DevOps fully takes hold, is it here to stay or just the returning curve of a technology cycle?