Jack of All DevOps, Master of None

A few years back, a developer wrote a post about how ‘DevOps’ was killing the developer. This started a chain reaction of collective nazel-gazing about what DevOps even means.

This of course led to a number of posts about what else DevOps is killing like development and productivity and all other things within the universe. In all of the back and forth however, we seem to have lost touch with exactly what DevOps means. Here is one definition:

DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.

What you do not see is a lot a technology mentioned. DevOps is not about the hottest CI/CD tools. It is not some management trick to get people to do even more work. And it is not some all encompassing, life-changing transcendental zen experience to collectively elevate your developers into the next plane of reality. Nor is it according to one Redditor “bugs, delivered continuously”.

Development is already complicated enough. The speed and complexity of code is not decreasing over time. Nor do the languages and frameworks used remain common practice for very long. For example, see how fast these technologies fell out of favor with developers.