Is DevOps Dead?

What Exactly Is DevOps Anyway?

Way back in 2006, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels got the ball rolling when he famously said, “Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations, throw it over, and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it; you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software.”

While the “you build it, you run it” mantra has become synonymous with DevOps, the actual application has not been so clear for many organizations. Dozens of articles and Reddit posts would seem to indicate that there is a very big range of opinions on this topic.

Is DevOps a cultural approach that bridges the gap between siloed ops and dev teams that get them to cooperate more closely? 

Perhaps it really is, as Werner probably intended, where software developers take full responsibility for infrastructure and operational processes. This would make it overlap a bit with the SRE role described by Benjamin Treynor Sloss, VP of Engineering, Google and founder of SRE, as “what you get when you treat operations as a software problem and you staff it with software engineers.” 

Or maybe it’s an over-used and abused job title that, in the real world, confuses job seekers, recruiters, and executives alike? As such, should the term DevOps be used in the hiring process, or perhaps recruiters should just list out all the required skills the candidate will need to have?

And What of Platform Engineering? Is This Something New or Just a Variation of DevOps?

Some might even argue that DevOps is just a sexier way to describe a Sysadmin role! 

Are companies hurting themselves by trying to force the organization to adopt DevOps without fully understanding what it’s meant to accomplish? Maybe true DevOps is only relevant for very advanced organizations like Amazon, Netflix, and other tech elites?

And what is the most important ingredient for successful DevOps? Is it about excellent communication between dev and ops? Is it about using the best automation and tooling? Or perhaps great DevOps can only be achieved if a company has developers who are infrastructure and operations experts and can handle managing it all on top of their daily coding.

Finally, assuming that there is some consensus that DevOps is dead, is it time to pay our respects and say farewell?

In this fast and furious session, these questions and more are hotly debated by Andreas Grabner, DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, Angel Rivera, Principal Developer Advocate at CircleCI, Oshrat Nir, Head of Product Marketing at Armo, and Fabian Met, CTO at Fullstaq.

Each of the panelists brings years of technology experience at leading companies and shares their unique perspectives and opinions on whether DevOps is dead or not.

The debate is moderated by Viktor Farcic, a popular YouTube educator, Upbound Developer Advocate, CDF ambassador, and published author. 

So put your headphones on, grab some popcorn, and enjoy!