[shawnreilly]

In an IT context, Ops refers to Operations (maintaining the operation of your IT infrastructure). If your infrastructure fails, Service(s) may be impacted (down/unavailable). Operations exists to keep the infrastructure (and resulting Services) alive and operational. A System Administrator (SysAdmin) is one of the roles (of many) in the traditional operations team. I see the traditional operations model evolving as infrastructure itself evolves. DevOps is a new operations methodology with a focus on leveraging development capabilities to simplify and automate traditional operations tasks. For example, identifying that a specific process always dies on a Server when x y and z happens, and in turn, writing a script/program to automatically restart the process when it experiences the defined behavior. Or another example, identifying that a network ACL needs to be modified when a new Server is provisioned, and in turn, writing a script/program to automatically populate the ACL when the Server is provisioned. Regarding TalentOps, seems to be a play on words to me; aka identifying other verticals of your startup staff and referring to it as <whatever>Ops as in "this person is responsible for <whatever> to operate".

[joeclark77]

Interesting take: "leveraging development capabilities to simplify and automate traditional operations tasks". I think of it as the opposite: leveraging operations discipline to improve development processes. We're talking about identifying bottlenecks in the development pipeline, for example manual testing, and targeting those for automation in order to elevate system throughput. This is the application of Lean manufacturing concepts such as Kanban to software development work.

I guess it's both: development applied to operations, and operations management applied to development.