"Ops guys are insulted and actually threatened economically if people make the claim you don't need ops people any more," Perry said.

However, the shift opens up some new opportunities for operations experts. People with operations experience have the opportunity to take on the role of operations architect, where they can focus on things such as getting operational requirements into the code and using the systems to better survive outages, Kim said. Operations people no longer have to do the repetitive manual work but instead can focus on bigger-picture architectural design, he said.

Perry agreed. "The quantity of ops people is going down already, but their importance and role in the organization will become very strategic," he said. With automation, fewer people are needed to deploy code, but the requirement for planning and architecting systems becomes more important, he said.

"Underlying all of this is that we are going through tremendous changes in the industry and there are all these new things happening that don't have names yet," Perry said.

He also pointed out that vendors are starting to jump on the NoOps concept. Platform-as-a-service provider AppFog, for example, argues that the emergence of PaaS offerings eliminates the need for most operations organizations, thus enabling a NoOps organization. It designed an infographic plotting out the evolution of IT organizations, which was on GigaOm earlier this year.