DevOps History and State

For years there have been more and more “DevOps Engineer” positions in companies, even though “DevOps” was never supposed to be a position, just a practice. As a result, we’ve collectively generated two different variations of “DevOps Engineers”. There were developers, who came from writing programs, and then there were operation engineers, whom did not.

I’ve always stated, and will continue to state, that all engineers should learn a programming language or two. Even if they’re day to day tasks are operational. There will always be a case where a custom solution is required and you will need to build something to fulfill tasks.

A little while ago, a stable version of Go was released. The “DevOps” industry favored the language for its simplicity, as well as python. This is a huge move forward in terms of the “DevOps” engineer being more programming oriented and that’s a good thing. Now, more recently, Rust is also in the same position. Recently the devops roadmap also included Rust in alongside Go for programming languages to learn.

In the distant future, perhaps within five to ten years, “DevOps Engineers” will not be a thing. Much like System Administrators jobs are now scarce, DevOps will also be scarce. I know this is controversial, and you shouldn’t worry about your position to be obsolete tomorrow, but think about it. What’s the similarity between MLOps, DevOps, Developers, and Testers. They’re all programmers. So even us, and yes I’m one of you, “DevOps” engineers; we should have programming languages we are comfortable with.

Why Rust?

Rust is very quickly becoming a multi-purpose language. It’s currently considered to be a systems language due to its memory safe architecture and lack of garbage collection, thanks to the invention of borrow-checker. There are many projects being re-written in Rust, discord is the most famous one of them all. All due to performance and memory safe desires. So, why does that apply to us? Because I suspect that there will be a time when programmers will also handle any and all infrastructure, and Rust, with it’s memory safe architecture, could lead the way to build applications as well as infrastructure.

How do I get started?

Well, I would first read The Rust Programming Language book. When I read this book, I did not do any of the examples, while reading the book. I did not need to. It’s that good. I would then start a Rust project of my own. For me, I started building a JIRA TUI (Terminal User Interface). I even stream about it here. Once you’ve gotten the handle of your programming language choice, you’ve now become more marketable, you should be more desirable to employers and have a bigger selection to go through on your journey.

Thank you.