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As a developer and sometimes system administrator, one of the scariest things I ever encounter is a server that's been running for ages which has seen multiple upgrades of system and application software. Why? Because an old system inevitably grows warts. They start as one-time hacks during outages. A quick edit to a config file saves the day. "We'll put it back into Chef later," we say, as we finally head off to sleep after a marathon fire fighting session.

System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess. I'm not complaining about old-school sysadmins. They know how to keep systems running, manage update and upgrade paths. This rant is about containers, prebuilt VMs, and the incredible mess they cause because their concept lacks notions of "trust" and "upgrades".

The DevOps team is "a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues and fun."