How I Started Worrying and Stopped Loving DevOps

Ignite

Summary: In this cautionary tale, I’ll share three real-world product-building experiences, mapping my journey as a product manager from a DevOps enthusiast to a wary cynic. I’ll share examples of how infrastructure can drift into ‘purgatory’: pipelines that are ‘never done,’ painfully complex to maintain, or beautifully engineered yet devoid of applications to support. My goal is to highlight the missteps I encountered, so future teams might avoid these traps and sidestep the costly pursuit of infrastructure perfection that can derail real progress.

How the talk will unfold: Introduction: The Allure of DevOps To bring us onto the same page - and this should not be controversial - I’ll share my attitude towards DevOps, where I see it being valuable and beneficial when building products and services.

Pitfalls: When Reality meets Ideology Drawing on my personal experience I will share a number of examples, where despite best intentions, our DevOps endeavours, descended into, at best waste and pain, at worst total dysfunction. I will touch on aspects such as technology ‘greed’, over-engineering, gold-plating, premature optimisation, strategic misalignment and others, and show how, from excitement and enthusiasm about DevOps users, stakeholders and ‘the business’ can easily become disillusioned, cynical and frustrated.

Conclusion: The moral of the tale, advice for the real world I will conclude with guiding principles to avoid falling into the same traps.

What participants will take away: An awareness of the important to adopt a critical view on

DevOps (and other) technical decisions
A list of potential pitfalls and challenges
Actionable guidance and suggestions on how to manage these tensions, risks and challenges to avoid falling into the same traps
An understanding that infrastructure is an important - but nevertheless - means to an end, that needs to serve a greater purpose