DevOps is dead. But what will replace it?

I think maybe I didn’t do a good job explaining the various abstractions and how they work together but in the scenario I outlined above combining those things together you most certainly are not going to be handwriting K8s yaml files and I don’t think that’s going to be a common thing to do in the future let alone having to configure DNS yourself etc.

These are all very much things that can be and are in the process on being abstracted away.

We are actually fairly close to a point now where you as an application developer can just describe your apps and how they work and be basically done.

Knowing how to use kubernetes is not going to be any kind of a requirement in the not too distant future.

This article is absolute BS.

Multi-tenant, blue green deploys, infrastructure as code..

There are layers and layers of new tools and vendor specific infra required for the cloud. Previously I just needed a server, a git repo and a jenkins job.. now I need 4 services with different apis, roles, rights, a jenkins job and 3 different templating languages like terraform or ansible.

No software engineer is going to want to do ALL of that, and if you do.. you should be scratching your head if you're really developing actually business value rather than castles in the sky. Its nice to have new toys.. but if customers are still calling your colleages that crucial things like invoicing or ordering is still broken.. than there is no way to justify weeks of research and development on ops tools before solving athe actual problem ( which would just take hours previously.)

So yeah, we actually need more devops people if we really want to keep those new services so that software engineers can actually keep engineering software itself, else everything slows down.

> We are actually fairly close to a point now where you as an application developer can just describe your apps and how they work and be basically done.

I don't know, DO launched their application deployment platform a few months ago and it's an abstraction on top of Kubernetes.

It's still in its early stages and while I use and love DO I didn't find this app platform to be near ready to run a complex web application on. It was really nice for running a hello world example web server and it sure looked great on a few demos videos but as soon as I tried to hook up a real application with a few moving parts I got pretty stuck to the point where I was hard blocked by it.

I'm sure DO's app platform will improve over time but people and organizations have applications to deploy today. Waiting around until the next thing is around, fully baked and battle tested isn't an option for most. It's almost always worth learning something fairly stable and implementing it and then incrementally changing it over time. If you always wait around for the new hotness you'll never ship anything and when you do, you'll always be in the most dangerous situation of being patient zero with limited documentations and bugs.

Heroku for what it is, does a good job but they also have 14+ years of experience and likely hundreds of thousands of dev hours behind it to create its abstractions and iron out the kinks, and despite that it's still not something everyone flocks to without question.

I think we have a very very long time to go before a serious contending solution comes along that perfectly abstracts away app deployment at scale to specifying a few configuration properties.

We reassigned time. It’s not like you work 50hrs instead of 40.

At the time of Agile I used to hear managers say it’s a way to stress the developer more and make him work longer. No. Agile a way to relieve stress and improve adequation using tighter feedback loops.

Same for DevOps. DevOps is a way to close the feedback loop so developers don’t just throw the binaries over the fence and let sysadmins deal with stacktraces (by submitting a Jira ticket obviously). You’ll then be incentivized into developing production-proof software and prove it by supporting it; while you have other colleagues developing other features.

This is just the same as when people complain that computers are getting slower even though the hardware is faster.

Software complexity expands to fill available resources. Only, in this case the available resources are manpower rather than hardware.