DevOps: The Never-Ending Story | Shimmy Says Ep. 42

DevOps doesn't end. It adapts. Hey everyone, it's Shimmy.

Welcome to Shimmy Says, you know, if I had a dollar for every time someone declared DevOps dead, I wouldn't need this gig. I'd be off in a beach somewhere with a bad wifi connection and drinking some really good drinks. But yet, here we are again.

It's a never ending story talking about DevOps and DevOps being dead. And that brings me to Shimmy. Says What?

What? Or the subject of our shimmy says this week, DevOps, the never ending story. Shout out to my team who came up with the, uh, thumbnail here of Meri riding the the Never Ending Story dog.

That was, that was pretty damn good. But anyway, let me tell you how this whole thing started. It started the way a lot of my shimmy stuff starts.

Someone a lot smarter than me writes something that I take notice of, and I say, Hmm. They got something there. And I just riff off of it.

Truth be told, I've made a career outta riffing off of smarter people, and that's okay. There's nothing a matter with, there's a life lesson there for you. In the, in this particular case, that Smarter person was Charity Majors.

Charity, of course is the CTO over at Honeycomb. She's smart. She says what's on her mind.

She says it plainly, and I love her for it. Charity wrote a blog post recently titled You Had One Job. Why 20 Years of DevOps Has Failed To Do It.

And it was a little bit of an indictment of DevOps, right? Because in Charity's mind, the one job they had was really to make observability work, right? Right.

To get those feedback loops in, to get devs working, to make sure their codes codes right, and they care about it. For me, it hit a nerve, not because it was wrong, because in a lot of ways it was frankly, painfully right? But most of all, it said out loud what a lot of people have been muttering into their coffee cups at conferences now for years.

In a lot of ways, it gave rise to the whole platform engineering movement. DevOps isn't perfect, right? So I RIFed on this.

com, and you could go check that article out. It's not that DevOps failed, it just needed the right tools. I wrote on it Charity and Christine Yen from, uh, honeycomb and others posted and commented.

And, you know, something happened. What normally happens when you write a good, excuse me, a good story. People engaged, they debated, they laughed.

They disagreed respectfully. Mostly, there's always some haters out there. Charity, as I said, charity yourself chimed in.

And instead of this turning into yet another, hey, DevOps is broken pile on. It turned into something better, an actual conversation, thought provoking. And that's when it really kind of hit home from your why.

Decided to do Shimmy says on it this week for all the marketing noise, for all the, this replaces DevOps decks we've had to sit through and suffer through for all the hot takes designed to sell you something shiny. You know what? DevOps is still here.

It's the never ending story. It may not be perfect. It definitely ain't finished, but it's very much alive and breathing and evolving right before our eyes.

But look, let me, let me make something clear to you, and let's be honest, 'cause this is really important. Anyone who tries to tell you DevOps was perfect and works perfectly is selling you something. They're probably trying to sell you a DevOps platform or maybe just a framework or maybe some roadmap slides with the, with way too many arrows in them.

We've seen that in the Infinities and all that. Here's the facts. com since 2013.

DevOps has always been messy. It didn't come with a clean definition. There was huge arguments over that.

It didn't come with some cute manifesto that everyone could agree or disagree over. It didn't even come at first with certification paths and maturity models in those early years. I know I helped start the DevOps Institute.

I co-founded it. And a lot of people were very upset about this sort of nebulous. You couldn't really pin it down kind of thing.

They wanted rules, they wanted boundaries, they wanted guardrails. They wanted to know if they were doing DevOps right? And every, a lot of arguments about it.

But you know what turned out that that ambiguity, that discomfort, that squishyness that my friends, was the feature, not the bug. Because while we were all arguing about definitions, DevOps was busy doing something else. It was working, not perfectly imperfectly for sure, but it was working.

It changed the conversation. It changed the nature of the game. It changed what we were doing as charity herself chimed in.

Careers were built around it. My career, her career and countless others. Teams were transformed by a company.

Shipped faster, failed better. And occasionally we all learned something. Whole markets and ecosystems, fortunes made and lost.

Mine included. Charities included, as I mentioned, and so many others. So a whole lot of people are gonna be watching this right now.

We didn't have the tools then that we have today, that's for sure. We didn't have the platforms that we have today, right? Platform engineering, IDPs, the, the DevOps platforms like Jfr and Harness.

We didn't have automation, we didn't have observability. We didn't have guardrails. We sure as s**t, they didn't have Gen AI or Agent ai.

But you know what we did add, we had DevOps and that was enough. Now, let's fast forward to today though guys, DevOps didn't get replaced. It's not rogue kill.

It didn't get killed. It didn't quietly fade away like old soldiers. It adapted.

It latched on to things like cloud native. We have cloud native without DevOps. It embedded itself.

It's part of platform engineering. Platform engineering grew out of it. It wrapped itself around SRE.

It took security and it made DevSecOps and AppSec now is sort of DevSecOps and supply chain security and all that. Hey, it grew up with GI and GI ups and now of course it's showing up everywhere in ai, right? DevOps and AI go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

You see, because the key is, it's almost like a kung fu juujitsu kind of thing. DevOps doesn't fight new movements. It absorbs them.

It evolves, it mutates it. It turns your energy against it into energy forward. It just keeps chugging along, which is why I love the line that keeps bouncing around in my head lately.

Ari, you know, I heard this originally from Andrew Clay Schafer at a DevOps days, and he said it many, many times. He said it's different ways over the years. But here's the thing, we may be finally getting the DevOps we deserve.

Andrew always said, the DevOps you get is the DevOps you deserve. And I think we're on the cusp of getting the DevOps we deserve. Think about that.

Think about it for a second, guys. Not the DevOps we were promised, not the DevOps, certainly that the vendors have been marketing all these years. Not even the DevOps that the conference keynotes hyped and promised us and cajoled us with.

It's the DevOps we deserve. Because DevOps at its core was never about the tools. It was never about the platforms.

It was never about the pipelines. It certainly wasn't about yaml. Thank God.

DevOps was always about humans. It's about how we work, it's about how we collaborate, it's about how we handle failure and learn from it and iterate and reiterate. It's how we share responsibility.

It's how we learn or don't learn at the, at its core, it's about humans and how humans change. That's how DevOps change as team of teams evolves. That's how DevOps evolves.

And that's why my friends, it's still here. That's why it refuses to die like some zombie or Frankenstein monster. And that's why every time, every time someone declares DevOps is dead, I hear a little bell, like from the uh, Mo Jimmy Stewart movie.

It's a wonderful life because they sound like someone yelling on a street corner yelling that email is dead while checking their inbox. So yeah, DevOps ain't perfect. DevOps has its blemishes and it's, and it's warts.

It did it magically fix everything. It never worked as good as they promised it was. But here we are, almost 20 years in.

We should be further along in some areas, that's for sure. But we're not. All of that's true.

But don't let the noise drowned out the signal. 'cause here's the part that gets lost in all that noise guys. DevOps has stood the test of time in an industry that loves reinventing itself for nothing more than reinvention's sake.

DevOps has endured, not because it was perfect, but because it was adaptable, evolvable because at its core, it's human. It's about humans, and humans are adaptable. It didn't insist on being one thing to all people.

The DevOps you get is the DevOps you deserve. I'll say it again, honestly, I'm excited guys, because for the first time in a long time, in this new era we're dealing with, with ai, agent ai, generative ai, all these, you know, things we're on the cusp of, we actually have tools that can make the dream alive, keep the hope alive. They can support the intent, if not the actual, uh, pieces of this dev of, of what DevOps is.

They are going to promote DevOps, not replace DevOps. 'cause DevOps will keep doing what it does. It'll absorbs these tools that amplify DevOps instead of pro pretending they invented it.

That's where it's at right now. So, no, this story isn't over. You know, as, as it says in the movie, if you've ever seen a movie, and I love that movie, the Never Ending Story, this My friends, is only the begin, begin beginning.

It's not even close to the end. DevOps isn't dead, it's not finished. And it's definitely not done surprising us.

It truly is the never ending story. So strap in because the next chapters are just getting started. It's gonna be really interesting.

Stay long for the ride. This is Shimmy says, have a great day everyone. We'll see you next time.

Says.