A Eulogy for DevOps

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Relationship between DevOps, Microservices, and “Ownership”

  • Many see DevOps and microservices as parallel outcomes of pushing “you build it, you run it” ownership to teams.
  • Others stress they’re orthogonal: DevOps is about breaking silos; microservices are just SOA with different tech, and can be overkill for small orgs.
  • Several note that microservices swapped code complexity for operational complexity, demanding strong platform/security teams to work well.

Culture Shift: Docs, QA, and Product Chaos

  • Widespread complaint that documentation, requirements, and QA have degraded under “move fast” cultures.
  • Dedicated QA teams are widely missed; devs and users now act as testers, lowering quality and raising rework.
  • Product managers often absorb QA/marketing duties, while devs juggle PM, dev, and QA, leading to duct-tape solutions instead of solid design.

What DevOps Was Supposed to Be vs Reality

  • Repeated claim: DevOps was a cultural practice to break dev/ops silos, not a job title or separate team.
  • Once companies created “DevOps teams,” they effectively rebuilt old ops silos under new branding, often without deep ops skills.
  • Some argue DevOps has simply become the standard: CI/CD, automated deployments, infrastructure-as-code, and self-service are now expected.

Kubernetes, Containers, and Complexity

  • Strong divide: some praise K8s/containers for reproducibility, portability, multi-environment parity, and stable APIs.
  • Others see K8s as overengineered, leaking internal complexity, demanding specialized platform teams, and being ill-suited for small/medium orgs.
  • For small systems, several advocate monoliths, simple bash/compose setups, or PaaS-style platforms instead of full K8s stacks.

Roles, Skills, and Gatekeeping

  • Nostalgia for seasoned sysadmins/DBAs with deep Unix/DB knowledge; many feel these skills were lost in cost-cutting and “cloud will handle it” thinking.
  • Others criticize old-school ops that resisted basic practices like version control.
  • Consensus that engineers who combine app dev with solid infra/DB skills are rare and undervalued; promotion structures often ignore this hybrid work.

Release Cadence, CI/CD, and Risk

  • Debate over deploying to production multiple times per day vs slower, regulated releases.
  • Advocates of trunk-based development and frequent prod releases claim it reduces incidents via smaller changes and stronger automation.
  • Others note regulatory and organizational constraints, arguing frequent deploy pipelines can still stop at non-prod environments.

Ethics and “User as Tester”

  • One view: using users as testers is acceptable when each user’s stake is tiny.
  • Counterview: if you take money, you have a moral duty to deliver a working service, regardless of ticket price; relying on users as testers is negligence.