What is the development direction of IT operation and maintenance engineers?

There is a joke in the industry: the more advanced the operation and maintenance, the more invisible it is! So the landlord is confused, provide your own ability!

when it comes to operation and maintenance, most of them are recruited by Party A's units, while Party B generally develops and implements them. After the project, Party A needs operation and maintenance. From the perspective of grass-roots positions, the division of labor between operation and development (including product managers) is quite large.

I have been doing software development for many years, and I usually mainly consider the realization of functions and non-functions. The operation and maintenance department is responsible for the stable and efficient operation of the system after it goes online. Therefore, the required technology is also very different.

The development focuses on various development languages, development frameworks, continuous integration environment, software engineering, algorithms and corresponding businesses, etc., and pays little attention to the underlying operating environment, especially after entering the cloud environment, less and less attention is paid to the non-functional requirements such as load balance and high availability.

The focus of operation and maintenance is on various environments in which the system runs. From more basic architectures such as computer rooms, networks, storage, physical machines and virtual machines to databases, middleware platforms, cloud platforms and big data platforms, the emphasis is not on programming, but on the use and management of such platforms.

therefore, development and construction, operation and maintenance are of course maintenance. Therefore, it is understandable that operation and maintenance are less valued than development, and it is difficult to shine. Nothing is an achievement, even though there is a lot of effort, even more. People who have seen the product operation have said, "Never mind what junk products are developed, but retaining customers is the concern of the operation and maintenance department"

But in the high-level consideration, although the operation and maintenance department is still less valued than the development, it is not just about meeting the business needs as soon as possible. Infrastructure is becoming more and more vocal. On the one hand, it is indeed a very expensive thing (money has the right to speak). Developing a system can't run without code. Raising a computer room (especially a high-end computer room) will cost hundreds of millions of dollars at every turn, and thousands of servers are not so easy to manage. The annual depreciation and scrapping are also money, and the photoelectric fee is enough to raise several advanced RD. On the other hand, infrastructure, especially after cloudization, must restrict the language and program architecture used in development. There is also more and more attention to safety management, which is a huge investment and even rises to the level of maintaining stability.

but generally speaking, the operation and maintenance engineer is the background of IT, and IT is the background of Party A's business. Therefore, importance is very important, but it may never be as important as RD. Of course, a small number of operations are also highly valued, such as manufacturing, but after all, it is a minority.

therefore, there is no turning back when it operation and maintenance engineers choose, and it is king to strive to provide their own abilities!