AI "devops" #2: Will there be an AI that can help manage cloud infrastructure by 2030?
10
56
1k
2030
78%
chance

Short version: will an AI be able to do the technical tasks an entry level devops engineer might be expected to handle?

More details:

  • The AI is given access to and (some) permissions on the interfaces (web, command line, etc) for a cloud compute provider (e.g. it can access AWS console and the aws CLI tool)

  • It is not given any special access to the service. It can only use the interfaces that are normally accessible by human users.

  • It is also given access to tools for communicating with other members of the org (Slack, email, some kind of video chat if that's relevant, etc)

I don't want to enumerate a particular set of tasks because I think it would be too long. It should at least be able to do all the things I (a non-devops engineer) can do. Some example tasks:

  • Do basic CRUD tasks on the providers compute and storage tools

  • Set up a base image according to some spec ("I need Python 3.11, PyTorch 2.0, CUDA, and our main github codebase") and spin up instances running that image

  • Run basic analysis queries (e.g. SQL queries on Athena for AWS)

  • Setup basic access control and assign users roles in a saneish way (giving everyone admin permissions is a no)

  • Setup a new service for an org (e.g. if the org wants to start using the providers' serverless offering it should be able to do a basic setup of the service).

  • Do all of that in response to user/management requests.

As I said I'm not a devops engineer, if there are important tasks I'm missing please post them in the comments. I am deliberately leaving out soft tasks like "help the devops team plan out what the orgs overall cloud policies are", even though that is of course an important part of a human's work.

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