The New Wall of Confusion

Was the fight with silos worth it?

DevOps was meant to break the rigid silos of the enterprise to improve the flow of changes through the system. To bring together Devs and Ops and reduce the confusion, reduce the cognitive load and let the team build a coherent value together.

Now we have DevOps engineers, DevOps teams, and DevOps departments. New silos? Maybe not.

It makes sense! If done right. DevOps people are building rails for development work to run smoothly through the organization.

Today, DevOps has basically turned mostly into Platform Engineering with many good practices formed around it and lots of useful tools reaching their maturity. Meaning that we can outsource many things and get running and reliable infrastructure/pipelines within days.

OTOH, I see situations when the industrialization of DevOps stands in the way of development.

Platforms become so complex that they require more effort to maintain than business applications. Processes are built around blocking interactions between Devs and DevOps.

Is a new wall being built? I hope not.

---