Most devops disaster stories I’ve heard lately are the result of endless addition of new tools. People join the company, see a problem, and then add another layer of tooling to address it, introducing new problems in the process. Then they leave the company, new people join, see the problems from that new tooling, add yet another layer of tooling, continuing the cycle.

I was talking to someone from a local startup a couple weeks ago who was trying to explain their devops stack. The number of different tools and platforms they were using was in the range of 50 different things, and they were asking for advice about how to integrate yet another thing to solve yet another self-inflicted problem.

It was as though they forgot what the goal was and started trying to collect as much experience with as many different tools as they could.