"Devops is on the rise primarily due to realization that there is a big gap between developing end-user systems and bare-bones systems administration"<p>That's the key take away here! I've held such a role in ~10,000+ node environment. I've since moved on to development, but I've been trying to drive this point to start-ups for years, but apparently most still think that:<p>1) Operations means installing an OS on a machine, doing backups (and may be occasionally checking how many threads are running in the application server)<p>2) As we no longer have to admin bare iron, start-ups do not need operations.<p>The hiring is done accordingly: the idea is to contract-out/outsource/reluctantly hire one or two "IT-type" admins whose goal is merely to (in a reactive fashion) respond to outages as they happen and (manually) provision servers and networking gear.<p>Nothing could be more wrong. With the move to commodity and virtualized commodity hardware, running operating systems that are geared (originally) towards developers rather than sys admins (e.g., Linux vs. Solaris or FreeBSD -- this isn't a stab at the latter two, it's rather a comment to how <i>much more</i> admin-friendly theses OSes are) the assumption should be that unless there's "lights out"-style automation in place, outages are going to be the norm rather than exception.