Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

437 points

4 years ago

Arguable the goals of DevOps align partly with the goals of system administrators in former days: Provide reliable compute infrastructure for

  1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD
  2) external users: end users

Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just got more specialized).

The platform of choice is mostly Kubernetes these days, which promises among other things stuff like

  - load balancing
  - self-healing
  - rollbacks/rollouts
  - config management

Before the cloud days, this stuff has been implemented using a conglomerate of different software and shell scripts, issued at dedicated "pet" servers.

In particular, a main critic is "state" and the possibility to change that state by e.g. messing with config files via SSH, which makes running and maintaining these servers more error-prone.

However, my main question is:

"If this old way of doing things is so error-prone, and it's easier to use declarative solutions like Kubernetes, why does the solution seem to need sooo much work that the role of DevOps seems to dominate IT related job boards? Shouldn't Kubernetes reduce the workload and need less men power?"

Don't get me wrong, the old way does indeed look messy, I am just wondering why there is a need for so much dev ops nowadays ...