Is DevOps the Future of Sysadmin?

Last year, Doug Hughes and Tom Limoncelli had the foresight to choose “DevOps” as the theme of the LISA ’11 conference. For some at the time, this was a controversial choice. Indeed, for a long time it had not been clear what DevOps even was about. Like “cloud,” DevOps had been suspiciously vaporous, vaguely connected to Web operations, and there was brewing skepticism that there was anything new, more a crowd of novices re-learning old lessons; however, Ben Rockwood’s excellent keynote at LISA ’11 changed that, in many minds.