The debate often has been heated, which some experts say may reflect the reactions of people whose jobs are threatened by a shift in the way IT groups work.

In his , Adrian Cockcroft, director of cloud systems architecture for Netflix, described his IT organization as having little need for operations staff, partly because the company has shifted to the cloud, where it can automate many former functions of the staff.

"The developers used to spend hours a week in meetings with Ops discussing what they needed, figuring out capacity forecasts and writing tickets to request changes for the data center. Now they spend seconds doing it themselves in the cloud," he wrote.

Since this marks a shift in the way IT organizations have been run, it warrants a new term, he said: NoOps.

Cockcroft is a proponent of the concept and the term, and he wrote the post following "sometimes heated discussion on Twitter about the term NoOps," he said.