Well written tools and cross-functional teams that do both operations, feature work and security are still the path forward IMO, we just need to refocus on developer experience.
We still use all the DevOps buzzword stacks, but we stopped doing dev ops. Instead, we are building out a really good ops team. This makes it possible to hire developers again.
Personally, I'm one of the better ops people on the developer side of the fence, but I'd need at least 2x typical principle engineer comp to take another job at a DevOps shop, and also wouldn't get even a quarter of my normal productivity.
At that point, you may as well just hire a junior undergrad graduate and burn the rest of your cash.
If you're comfortable with AWS and have built things as a software developer, it becomes clear very quickly. These things are intrinsically linked, and pretending they aren't is just kicking the can down the road until you have to solve some non-trivial problem.
There have been huge innovations and value-adds over the last 10+ years in cloud and serverless, yet everywhere I've worked that silos "DevOps" from devs has already baked in the culture that devs can just avoid knowing anything about AWS, that DevOps will be the gatekeepers, and that devs can just work within the "lowest common denominator" box of tooling that those gatekeepers think is appropriate. Meanwhile, infra costs are skyrocketing but it's all good because we're mostly "cloud agnostic."
I don't want to just be closing Jira tickets. I want to actually solve business problems well. And to do that, I don't want to be constrained to someone else's "box," throwing code over the wall to them, and hoping for the best.
It's fine up until you have to solve hard problems. Once you need autoscaling or more of a datastore than you can get from vertically scaling a relational database, your brain will be REALLY fried trying to solve those things without touching anything at the Kubernetes or AWS layer.
Or it won't really be fried, because it won't really get solved. That's the pattern I've seen more often: just keep scaling up the CPU and RAM for individual containers / instances because devs can't solve it without DevOps, and DevOps can't solve it without devs. Cloud costs keep going up, and the problem's not really solved, but at least nobody had to understand more than they wanted to.
I’ve never touched a computer running my company’s production software, and I never will.
20 years ago, that would have been literally inconceivable with someone who was called a “Software Engineer.”