Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Navigating the infrastructure skills gap for DevOps teams (PRT089)

Summary

• Tomer, the field CTO for Quali, discusses the challenges of infrastructure automation and the skills gap in DevOps.
• He highlights the disparity between the number of DevOps team members and the people they serve, often leading to bottlenecks.
• The journey towards infrastructure automation starts with manual processes, moves to partial automation with tools like CloudFormation and Terraform, and aims for a frictionless environment where developers can access resources on-demand.
• Challenges slowing down DevOps teams include legacy infrastructure, cultural adoption of DevOps, and the complexity of applications and infrastructure.
• A common issue is the "islands of automation" where different teams use different tools, leading to silos and inefficiencies.
• Quali proposes a solution using "blueprints" to standardize and streamline the deployment process, enabling scalable self-service for users.
• The process involves auto-discovery of assets, governance to prevent misuse, and the use of repeatable blueprints to provide environments to end-users.
• The blueprint approach allows for a microservices-like model for DevOps, where different teams can maintain different components, reducing the complexity of a "DevOps monolith."

Insights

• The ratio of DevOps team members to the number of developers they support is often imbalanced, leading to delays and inefficiencies in providing necessary infrastructure.
• The transition from manual to automated infrastructure is a maturity path that many companies are still navigating, with varying levels of success and adoption.
• The concept of "islands of automation" reflects a common problem in organizations where inconsistent tooling and processes lead to fragmented and inefficient workflows.
• Quali's blueprint approach suggests a shift towards modular, reusable components in infrastructure automation, akin to the principles of microservices architecture in software development.
• The emphasis on self-service and governance indicates a trend towards empowering developers while maintaining control and oversight to ensure cost management and security compliance.
• The talk suggests that infrastructure as code (IaC) is becoming more sophisticated, moving beyond simple script execution to lifecycle management and integration with business processes.
• The presentation underscores the importance of DevOps culture and practices, beyond just the adoption of tools, to achieve a truly agile and responsive infrastructure environment.