DevOps: The Funeral

A decade long VC downpour driven by negative interest rates is drying up. All the vaporware built in its wake is now evaporating. There will be no shortage of narratives explicating it. The fortune wheel turns on.

> Let’s be clear: if an environment can’t be created/deleted with a single command, and normal changes to its configuration (ex: size) can’t be applied in a simple way, you are not doing Devops. You are a sysadmin and you are living before 2012. No amount of money paid to the yellow cloud provider will change that.

We are living in a world where operations and system architecture is more complicated than ever. Is it hidden behind more layers to where more people can use it in a self service fashion? Yes, but that not does not mean it's simple.

The goal of making an entire environment that can be created and deleted in one command is often a naïve goal. If there's any complexity in what you're deploying you'll quickly find that you'll have gaps in your automation, there will be things that the cloud provider hasn't surfaced, Terraform cloud modules will be out of date, things that need to be configured with a certain level of layering or ordering outside of scope. You can get close, but it's often wasted cycles met with frustration.

If you're spinning up something simple sure, but the idea that if you can't create a potentially complex environment with one command "in a simple way" just goes to show me that the author hasn't dealt with a complex enough environment.

When I first started my career I was working with a ton of systems administrators, a lot of IT workers as you'd say. The issue is a lot of the work becomes remedial because standards are not in place. Frameworks aren't consistent and you end up with sprawl that grinds away any resemblance of structure. Personally devops/SRE, or whatever you'd like to call it has changed that outlook.

Instead of remedial work on a linux VM we have tooling and a higher form of standards so you don't have some grey beard reinventing the wheel creating a silo on a farm of VMs that no one wants to touch.. it has made things better, not perfect though.

Ultimately the culture and tooling doesn't remove the human aspect, I see the same thing in other fields like data engineering, or SWE where people will go above and beyond to create something already figured out, reinventing the wheel so to speak. Ultimately creating their own job security forcefield or works of art that no one in the company is willing to touch that provides a fraction of usability that something out of the box would provide and a lot of headaches instead.

Over the years I've learned that consistent solutions that are clear cut and adhere to some sort of shared standard are a win. I have a feeling that many think that's boring and would rather create their own path. I think that's where things get messy for the average tech worker.

How I perceive the end of devops, from an ops (biased?) perspective.