Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do It

Summary

Let’s start with a question. What is DevOps all about?Empathy!Breaking down silos!Forcing operations engineers to write more software!I’ll tell you my answer. In retrospect, I think the entire DevOps movement was a mighty, twenty year battle to achieve one thing: a single feedback loop connecting devs with prod.On those grounds, it failed.Not because software engineers weren’t good at their jobs, or didn’t care enough. It failed because the technology wasn’t good enough. The tools we gave them weren’t designed for this, so using them could easily double, triple, or quadruple the time it took to do their job: writing business logic.This isn’t true everywhere. Please keep in mind that all data tools are effectively fungible if you can assume an infinite amount of time, money, and engineering skill. You can run production off an Excel spreadsheet if you have to, and some SREs have done so. That doesn’t make it a great solution, the right use of resources, or accessible to the median engineering org.Good news and bad newsThe good news is that AI has changed this. The technology we have now is good enough to create a feedback loop between developers and production systems for the median engineering team, for the first time ever.The bad news is also that AI has changed this. Our existing feedback loops are unprepared to deal with the current amount of code slop. And I think we all know what the volume of code slop is about to do:(Oh yeah, guess what I learned to do over the break? STICK ART, baby doll.)I know this is a big, spicy claim. And since I got as pissed off as anyone when vendors were posting clickbait about “DEVOPS IS DEAD,” I’m going to back up and show you my argument from scratch. I’m not saying this in an accusatory, inflammatory kind of way. The truth is, we were all sensing and circling around the same problem, and it was the right one. We did the best we could with the tools that we had.Value-generating feedback loopsIf your business makes money by buildi...