[HN Gopher] Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do It
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Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do It
Author : mooreds
Score : 31 points
Date : 2026-01-17 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.honeycomb.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.honeycomb.io)
| blutoot wrote:
| I can't wait for indie developers to build super-agents that
| commoditize providers like Honeycomb.io and more importantly
| clone all their features and offer them up for free as OSS.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > most orgs are used to responding to a daytime alert by calling
| out, "Who just shipped that change?" assuming that whoever merged
| the diff surely understands how it works and can fix it post-
| haste. What happens when nobody wrote the code you just deployed,
| and nobody really understands it?
|
| I assume the first time this happens at any given company will be
| the moment they realize fully autonomous code changes made on
| production systems by agents is a terrible idea and every change
| needs a human to take responsibility for and ownership of it,
| even if the changes were written by an LLM.
| hippo22 wrote:
| What happens if the person who wrote the code went on vacation?
| What happens if the code is many years old and no current team
| member has touched the code?
|
| Understanding code you didn't personally write is part of the
| job.
| blutoot wrote:
| I think the opposite will happen - leadership will forego this
| attitude of "reverse course on the first outage".
|
| Teams will figure out how to mitigate such situations in future
| without sacrificing the potential upside of "fully autonomous
| code changes made on production systems" (e.g invest more in a
| production-like env for test coverage).
|
| Software engineering purists have to get out of some of these
| religious beliefs
| tarxvf wrote:
| If companies were generally capable of that level of awareness
| they would not operate the way that they do.
| politelemon wrote:
| If your developers weren't looking at dashboards before, they
| won't use a chat interface to interrogate it either. That doesn't
| really bring it to them any more than their existing
| capabilities. There's also a worrying underlying assumption being
| made here that the answers your LLM will give you are accurate
| and trustworthy.
| amtamt wrote:
| > There's also a worrying underlying assumption being made here
| that the answers your LLM will give you are accurate and
| trustworthy.
|
| I first hand saw in, AWS devDays, an AI giving SIWINCH as
| "root-cause" of Apache error in a containerized process is in
| EKS for a backend FCGI process connection error. It has been
| extremely hard since that demo to trust any AI for system level
| debugging.
| temp0826 wrote:
| If we were smart we'd use AI to grok a system in order to
| help us reduce its complexity. I don't think we're anywhere
| close to even being able to provide all the necessary context
| to solve problems like this.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| DevOps is dead because it's run by a bunch of ops people who
| don't know how to do dev and a bunch of dev people who don't know
| how to do ops. The only tooling problem is that a bunch of
| companies created "DevOps tools" that then get dictated to use:
| K8s, terraform, etc. The only way this works is if you build the
| application to fit within those frameworks. Writing an indexer
| that is massively parallel and is mainly constrained by
| CPU/Memory. Instead, you have devs building something that gets
| thrown over the fence to a devops team that then containerizes it
| and throw it on K8s. What happens if the application requires
| lots of IOPS or network bandwidth? K8s doesn't schedule
| applications that way. "Oh you can customize the scheduler to
| take that into account". 2 years later, it's still not
| "customized" because they are ops people who don't know how to
| code. If you do customize it, the API is going to change in a few
| months which will break when you upgrade.
| blutoot wrote:
| I would say, in pre-CC (pre-claude-code), this might seem like
| a daunting task for average DevOps engineers. But in post-CC,
| there is just no excuse to fret from such challenges.
| gmane wrote:
| Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with business
| critical production environments.
| pryelluw wrote:
| It's like saying that in a post-Viagra world there shouldn't
| be men who have trouble getting laid.
| blutoot wrote:
| Don't want to get too deep into your analogy. I was
| addressing the "DevOps cannot code" part. To me it is a
| leadership failure if a DevOps team is still afraid of
| tackling bigger challenges (like the example given by the
| OP). That, of course, depends on whether DevOps teams will
| exist in the long run.
| orsorna wrote:
| Would you say it's truly dead or that it fails to meet the
| performance bar you've described?
|
| The reality is that most devs do not consider a holistic
| picture that includes the infrastructure they will be deploying
| to. In many cases, it's certainly a skill issue; good devs are
| hard to find. And to flip the coin, it's hard to find good ops
| people too.
|
| The reason DevOps continues to linger, however vague a
| discipline it is, is because it allows the business to
| differentiate between revenue generating roles and cost center
| roles. You want your dev resources to prioritize feature work,
| at the beckon of PMs or upper management, and let your "DevOps"
| resources to be responsible for actually getting the product
| deployed.
|
| In essence, it's a ploy to further commoditize engineering
| roles, because finding unicorns that understand the picture
| top-to-bottom is difficult (finding /top/ talent is
| difficult!). In this way, DevOps is well and alive, as a Romero
| zombie.
| mosura wrote:
| It failed because there is an ongoing denial that development and
| operations are two distinct skillsets.
|
| If you think 10x devs are unicorns consider how much harder it is
| to get someone 10x at the intersection of both domains.
| (Personally I have never met one). You are far better off with
| people that can work together across the bridge, but that
| requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we're not able to
| do that.
| tsss wrote:
| You don't need 10x developers. You just need to avoid the 1/10
| multiplier of pitting separate development and operations teams
| against each other.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| In my company, instead of relying on an ops team.. we rely on a
| devops team.
| zug_zug wrote:
| "I think the entire DevOps movement was a mighty, ... it failed."
|
| I'm so sick of this nonsense. "Devops" isn't failing, isn't an
| issue, you can rename it whatever you want, but throughout my
| career the devops engineers (the ones you don't skimp on) are the
| best, highest paid professionals at the company.
|
| I don't know why I keep reading these completely crazy think-
| pieces hemming and hawing about a system (having a few engineers
| who master performance/backups/deployments/oncall/retros) that
| seems to be wildly successful. It would be nice if more engineers
| understood under-the-hood, but most companies choose not to
| exclusively hire at that caliber.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| Because the idea you can have all aspects of maintaining a
| complex piece of technology, maintained by a single cross-skilled
| team of interchangeable cogs, is utopian and unworkable past any
| reasonable level of scale
|
| DevOps, shift left, full stack dev, all reminds me of the
| Futurama episode where Hermes Conrad successfully reorgs the
| slave camp he's sent to, so that all physical labour is done by a
| single Australian man
|
| Speaking darker, there is a kind of - well, perhaps not
| _misanthropy_ , but certainly a not-so-well-meaning
| dismissiveness, to the "silo breaking" philosophy that looks at
| complex fields and says "well these should all just be lumped
| together as one thing, the _important stuff_ is simple, I don 't
| know why you're making all these siloes, _man_ " - assuming that
| ops specialists, sysadmins, programmers, DBAs, frontend devs,
| mobile devs, data engineers and testers have just invented the
| breadth and depth and subtleties of their entire fields, only as
| a way of keeping everybody else out
|
| But modern systems are complex, they are only getting more so,
| and the further you buy into the shift-left everyone-is-
| everything computer-jobs-are-all-the-same philosophy the harder
| and harder it will get to find employees who can straddle the
| exhausting range of knowledge to master
| alphazard wrote:
| DevOps only works when the developers are always right. What
| usually happens is the DevOps team thinks they know best (they
| are developers too, just not the ones using the tools), and they
| build a lot of garbage that no one wants to use, often making
| things more complicated than they were before.
|
| Eventually a bureaucrat becomes the manager of the team, and
| seeks to expand the set of things under DevOps' control. This
| makes the team a single point of failure for more and more
| things, while driving more and more developer processes towards
| mediocrity. Velocity slows, while the DevOps bottlenecks are used
| as a reason to hire.
|
| It's an organizational problem, not a talent or knowledge
| problem. Allowing a group to hire and grow within an
| organization, which is not directly accountable for the success
| of the other parts of the organization that it was intended to
| support, is creating a cancer, definitionally.
| blutoot wrote:
| My message to the CTO of Honeycomb.io (who apparently wrote this
| post): please avoid getting philosophical and controversial to
| gin up curiosity about your AI platform. If you want to highlight
| the benefits of your platform then do so earnestly and
| objectively. Please don't mask marketing with an excoriation of a
| profession that has never been well-defined (or has always been
| defined to fit into an organization's political landscape for the
| most part). And you guys (like every other SRE/Ops platform)
| capitalized on that structural divide and deservedly got rich by
| selling licenses to these teams. I don't think you can come in
| now with this holier-than-thou best practice messaging just
| because platforms like yours have zero moat in this post-CC/Codex
| world.
|
| Hence my vitriol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662287.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > id getting philosophical and controversial to gin up
| curiosity about your AI platform
|
| Also: please could he please avoid doing it by illustrating his
| non-sense with graphs that are _both_ childish and non-
| sensical?
| anonymars wrote:
| Am I the only one who remembers when DevOps meant "developers are
| responsible for dealing with the operational part of their
| software too, so that they don't just throw stuff over the wall
| for another team to deal with the 3AM pages"?
|
| It seems to have become: "we turned ops into coding too, so now
| the ops team needs to be good at software engineering"
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