This article is based on commentary from Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute, originally published on informationweek.com in early 2018. The core themes — SRE growth, IT re-skilling, and cultural transformation — remain highly relevant to DevOps practitioners today.
Retire “No-Ops” — Welcome to New-Ops
For years, the technology industry flirted with the term “no-ops” — the idea that automation would eventually eliminate the need for operations teams altogether. Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute, argues this framing is not only inaccurate but actively harmful to the people doing the work. “If I’m an operations person… I hear no job, no future, no respect,” she says.
The reality on the ground is almost the opposite. Rather than shrinking the operational footprint, DevOps adoption is generating a wave of new, specialized roles that didn’t exist a decade ago. Groll’s preferred replacement term captures this well: new-ops.
New Engineering Roles Born from DevOps
DevOps has moved well beyond a buzzword and into a structural shift in how engineering organizations are composed. As teams adopt continuous integration, continuous delivery, and infrastructure-as-code practices, demand has grown for roles that bridge the traditional development and operations divide. Among the roles Groll highlights:
- Automation Architect — designs and owns the automation strategy across the software delivery pipeline
- Release Engineer — manages the process of packaging, versioning, and shipping software reliably
- Continuous Delivery Architect — builds and governs the pipelines that allow code to flow from commit to production
- DevOps Coach / Agile Coach / Automation Coach — cultural and process roles focused on helping teams adopt new ways of working
These roles reflect a broader truth: automating delivery doesn’t remove the need for human expertise — it changes what that expertise looks like.
The Rise of the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Of all the roles emerging from the DevOps movement, Groll singles out the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) as one of the most significant. Originally developed at Google to apply software engineering principles to operations problems, the SRE role is now spreading rapidly across the industry.
“DevOps kind of stops at deployment,” says Groll. “I think SRE is going to help address that bridge between deployment and production.” Where continuous delivery focuses on getting code out the door reliably, SRE focuses on what happens after — keeping systems available, performant, and resilient in production.
Groll describes SRE as “continuous operations compared to continuous delivery or continuous deployment” — meaning it brings the same engineering rigor and automation mindset into the operational domain that DevOps brought to the release pipeline.
The demand signal is real. Groll attended an SRE conference where 650 attendees identified professionally as site reliability engineers — and nearly every sponsor booth was staffed by a talent acquisition team actively recruiting. “They were all hunting for SRE talent,” she says.
The Cultural Challenge: IT Managers in the Middle
Adopting new toolchains is the easy part of DevOps transformation. The harder problem is cultural change — and that challenge falls disproportionately on IT managers. “We know how to buy tools; we don’t really know how to transform culture,” says Groll.
IT managers are being asked to do things their training didn’t prepare them for: build and lead cross-functional teams, share accountability across organizational boundaries, and manage human dynamics that can’t be automated away. Groll is empathetic to their position but clear that the skill gap needs to be addressed directly.
She pushes back on the popular concept of the “frozen middle” — the idea that middle management is an immovable obstacle to transformation. Instead, she frames IT managers as an untapped resource. “It’s grooming and teaching them how to be transformational leaders,” she says, “and helping them understand how to manage a cross-functional squad.”
This re-skilling is not just good for the organization — it’s good for the individual. IT managers who develop these leadership capabilities become more relevant, not less, in a DevOps-oriented world.
What New-Ops Actually Encompasses
The “new-ops” framing isn’t just semantic — it points to a genuine expansion of what the operations discipline now touches. Groll identifies several domains that fall under this broader umbrella:
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) — operationalizing reliability as an engineering problem
- Cloud Operations — managing infrastructure at scale across cloud platforms
- Data Analytics and AI — applying data-driven insights to operational decisions
- Security (DevSecOps) — integrating security practices into the delivery pipeline
- Skills Development — continuous learning as a core operational competency
Each of these areas represents growth, not contraction — opportunities for operations professionals to deepen their value rather than defend their existence.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- The SRE role is one of the fastest-growing in DevOps-adjacent engineering — if you’re in operations, understanding SRE concepts is increasingly valuable regardless of your title.
- Cultural transformation is the hardest part of DevOps adoption, and it requires deliberate investment in leadership development — not just tooling.
- IT managers are not obstacles to transformation; with the right coaching and skill development, they can become its champions.
- “No-ops” is a misleading and demoralizing term. The operational skill set is expanding, not disappearing.
- DevOps doesn’t end at deployment — production reliability, observability, and incident response are engineering problems that require engineered solutions.
Original source: InformationWeek — DevOps Futures: SREs, Re-Skilling, and New-Ops. Quotes attributed to Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute.