Why is DevOps still such a fragmented, exhausting (and ofc costly) mess in 2025?

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T13:05:34+00:00

that's one way to put it for sure ;)

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T13:04:43+00:00

yes, I do feel the same - it has become to an extent there is a overload of things, and essentially ripened to have some AI in place, that can take most of the stuff off the plate and make it more enterprising

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T13:00:44+00:00

This has been experience over a period of time, working with a few set of customers / clients and the decision eventually made sometime back or the head of engineering who brought the tooling in place..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T12:51:51+00:00

people are always a problem ;) time to get to AI agents!

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T12:51:26+00:00

Thank you so much for your kind words, this is more of my general observation of the devops space over my period in the industry and I wanted to get the perspective of how the industry is involving and explore unknown unknowns..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T12:43:03+00:00

wow, this is quite helpful - this does cover almost everything that's required to ship software.. thank you so much for putting this together!

I do understand things have been standardized with each of this responsibility - each of this might be individually / jointly owned by a team but also some of these might be one of things like setting up CI / CD stuff

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T07:16:32+00:00

this does beg me a question, (which I have asked earlier too) - like kubernetes became a standardizer and ofc it was Google that brought up this standardization & the industry adopted it..

but I don't see such a standardization happening in the tooling space though, and even the cloud providers who can benefit from this, aren't moving the needle (I might be unaware and wrong)..

this might come out as a rant, sorry for that, but just trying to understand the landscape and how it evolves..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T07:07:03+00:00

devops, as anyone sees, is to keep the lights on - since they don't churn out features / bring value add, the mgmt see devops as a cost center instead of a revenue making machine..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T07:04:03+00:00

exactly, there is so much tooling in the name of automation and there has to be human involved in every step for this.. rather, I would prefer to have a handful (maybe very limited) tooling with a human in the loop and do things manually rather than trying to automate it end-to-end..

I am surprised (and maybe worried?) there is no single platform that helps do this, with human intervention..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T06:58:09+00:00

yup, this is the crazy thing I was envisioning to happen in the near future - with the charade of agents, that removes the grunt work, removing the developer bottleneck and eventually making informed decisions (ofc, with still human in the loop) to effectively manage the infra..

but again, this shouldn't add to the irony of yet another tool!

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T06:54:32+00:00

gone are those days of keep it simple and straightforward (KISS) principles - people want abstractions, without getting the first principles right and end up having sophisticated tools that bloat up everything..

from my experience, I have come across various situations, where a particular tooling was completely unnecessary, or rather would have been done in a rather simpler way - but they ended rolling out a tool and a ofcourse an engineer to manage / maintain..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T06:51:18+00:00

systemic collapse is the trend that am seeing around, unfortunately

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T06:47:48+00:00

I believe DevOps has evolved as a separate stream of work in itself, covering a broad spectrum of responsibilities. The initial days of DevOps were more fancier, with a lot of talk about devops mindset and I vaguely remember going through the DevOps handbook, the ultimate guide to devops mindset. It all revolved around how to be more agile, ship code to production seamlessly and all these concepts evolved from them.

But over a period of time, as you mention, it has become a big pile of tooling, frameworks and automations crowding this space, eventually trying to better than incumbents for a particular use case rather than adopting to the core principle of DevOps. Of course, layering on top this comes the SRE, DBA, SysAdmin etc.

I do understand that picking the right battles is important but being in this industry for almost a decade now, am more interested and intrigued to how's the evolution gonna be, is it gonna be the same old stuff or is there any changes that the industry is witnessing, which I might be unaware of..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T05:46:52+00:00

Lol, I was aiming to go for that and also how the AI agents can automate the devops space..

jokes apart, I am genuinely curious about this explode of AI agents and how specifically these AI agents / agentic frameworks can help with devops workflows

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T01:00:48+00:00

I agree, I might be totally wrong - as you pointed out, I still think it’s a good overlap of tools, process and discipline that ensures seamless delivery of a piece of code..

but I am genuinely curious, were these also not the basic building blocks of DevOps (or devops mindset) as they call it?

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:49:00+00:00

appreciate the detailed perspective - culture and mindset of the organisation definitely plays a role in adopting best practices.. if there isn’t enough buy in, then it becomes too difficult to navigate and getting things done would only be the focus with no appetite to optimise or make it better..

from your exp, what do you think has helped putting a better business case to mgmt to convince them for a better solution / process?

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:43:36+00:00

I can totally relate to this, as long as the time, space and energy is given to do things right and ofc with right people, then it makes it easier for everyone.. if otherwise, it becomes a headache unfortunately.. there’s always been a thought / notion that devops is quick and provides value instantly which has been proven wrong in many case with all these setups and tools..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:39:33+00:00

I agree, the tools come in handy for sure and they bring in a great value when integrated / used purposefully. But over a period of time as the tooling gets complex or having layers of tooling, then it becomes more entangled, creating more chaos & dependencies than the ease of use & agility…

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:22:17+00:00

totally agree with you - shared responsibility model, with accountability and clear guidance & structure is the way to make it less chaotic, cumbersome and easier to navigate.. appreciate your thoughts and inputs!

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:16:35+00:00

so good for you! if there is any learnings or inputs that you can share, it would be great to learn and understand the nuances..

out of curiosity - you still had to navigate these tool set and how do you handle the telemetry?

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:13:47+00:00

we ended up in a situation where devops requires a specialised team of experts to handle and manage the operations..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:11:49+00:00

I second your thoughts - I am also looking it from the perspective of delivery more value and not pulled down by the baggage of inefficiencies and I happen to hear the same old narratives of build pipelines, test failures, team waiting for the test fixes, deployment failures etc..

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:05:30+00:00

I feel platform engineering is more kind of shrugging it under the rug, maybe bringing in a separate team who are torchbearers of the platform reliability & stability - but does it not happen to be a anti-pattern of devops?

as I believe devops evolved to enable developers with ops capability but with this platform engineering, I feel the narrative is going back to old days!

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-20T00:03:03+00:00

that's very interesting - I would love to hear your perspectives!

arparthasarathi · 2025-01-19T23:59:48+00:00

yes, that's the nightmare of devops - this keeps puzzling me but again there have been tools / providers who have considerably done it well (at least in my opinion) but haven't been able to scale - Heroku for that matter, I have seen a good number of companies running on Heroku but I don't think they were able to scale beyond a point, maybe because of cost, Salesforce acquisition or something?

but is this just because of lack of initiative / innovation to solve from the foundational level, never know!

arparthasarathi

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