DevOps is dead. But what will replace it?

I never heard of Autopilot before but it sounds like what AWS has had for a while with Fargate where you don't need to manage your worker nodes, instead you define what compute resources you want and what tier of instances they should run on (CPU optimized, general, etc.).

Things like this are definitely a very welcome change but running a production workload on Kubernetes is still no where near a hands off exercise, even with the cluster creation and scaling aspect abstracted away. There's still learning, using and applying Kubernetes.

Sure once you have the knowledge and experience you might only need something like 200-250 lines of YAML to run a production grade stateless web app service on your cluster including a few bells and whistles like external-dns but getting there isn't hands off and things are changing, then there's also figuring out how to automate all of this into a CI / CD pipeline and ensuring any services being built are architected to run in a load balanced container friendly way (using object storage, generally stateless, env variables, etc.). Not all of these things are a given.

I just mostly went through this path in the last few months while working part time for a client. I'm basically at the point of wrapping things up with external-dns and it's taken around 80 hours to get there. That's not including automating all of this in CI yet too. In end there's no way I would classify myself as an expert either, there's still a lot left to learn, but that timeframe includes learning Kubernetes from scratch after already having worked with Docker / Ansible for 6+ years and being comfortable with sysadmin / ops tasks in general. It wasn't the hardest thing in the world but it wasn't anywhere near hands off. It was like learning any other complex piece of software. A crazy amount of trial and error while reading the docs and scouring the internet for as many resources as you can find.

The same process happened with Serverless too. It took a different amount of time to get a function running in a production ready way but there were a ton of things to learn along the way.

In both cases this required spending a lot of time learning things that a lot of developers either don't care about or don't have time to learn because they are busy developing business features. IMO the demand for ops style roles will never go away, even going with the highest level of abstraction with Heroku requires spending time setting it all up and keeping things in check.

The view in this article is that DevOps is a role, it was never meant to be this way.

The whole purpose of DevOps was to break down barriers between Dev and Ops, by not creating specialist roles and allowing developers to take ownership of ops, removing the need for the SysAdmin gates.

Instead what this article highlights is that we’ve moved the complexity to specialist tools which require another specialist role.

I would say this suggests you’re solving the wrong problem.

Agreed. Reminds me of articles and blogs that GitLab team publishes these days.