We Solved DevOps. What’s Next?

Abstract

Hear me out: We solved DevOps. I am not saying that everyone is doing it right (or even trying), but we have the solution if you want to do it right. Here is the theory, the technology, the communities, the docs, and the books—go knock yourself out. Do DevOps: empower your teams, make deployments a breeze, build invincible CI/CD pipelines, and create production environments that are secure, stable, and observable. Done. Now, in perfect alignment with DevOps and the Theory of Constraints, it’s time to turn our gaze to the next bottleneck: the production environments of our production environments. They’re a mess. We accept soul-sucking toil, slow and unstable tests and builds, and constant distractions as the norm, just as we accepted the insufferable, manual “throw garbage between silos” all-night deployments of the pre-DevOps era. But, as with DevOps, we shouldn’t take these for granted. It’s time to rise again and resist our development environments’ “Pre-DevOps” state. Let’s engineer better developer productivity for all!