Chapter 1: The Struggles of Modern DevOps

Recently, I had an enlightening discussion with a senior DevOps engineer who opened up about his frustrations and experiences in the field. We talked about how the landscape of DevOps appears to be deteriorating, and his insights struck a chord with me.

With over a decade of experience, this Senior Staff DevOps Engineer began his career in 2010, focusing on server automation, cloud migrations, and deploying monolithic applications. Those early years were fulfilling for him—he felt he was genuinely making progress. However, since 2018, the focus has shifted predominantly to tools like Terraform and Kubernetes, bringing along a myriad of complexities. The last few years have felt like an unending challenge.

In his recent roles, he has observed a growing aversion towards the DevOps team and a lack of interest in professionalizing operations. Developers are increasingly opting to migrate applications to platforms like Heroku to sidestep interactions with DevOps and Security teams. Project Managers frequently hire external DevOps consultants to oversee projects, completely bypassing the internal team to manage things directly. He noted that it’s become a common narrative: avoid the DevOps team at all costs, as they prioritize doing things correctly rather than hastily.

Three months ago, he joined a new company and quickly encountered familiar issues. Tasked with preparing a developer demo for production, he found that the infrastructure established by the development team was chaotic—AWS keys were exposed in Git, IAM roles were overly permissive, and environment variables were precariously stored in S3 buckets. Everything was configured through the console, and resources were significantly oversized, introducing unnecessary services that the organization did not utilize.

He had to reconstruct everything using Terraform while adhering to much stricter security protocols, but he found it challenging to complete the project due to the app team’s reluctance to assist with debugging or testing. With executive expectations for immediate project completion, the blame game began, and he found himself in a planning meeting where another team demanded the infrastructure for a new application be ready in just five business days. The framework lacked any documentation for deploying to AWS, leaving him bewildered.

Despite his advocacy for automation, templating, and thorough planning over the years, he feels that making headway has become more daunting than ever. He is now contemplating whether to accept this reality or transition into a related field, such as infrastructure security.

Reflecting on his narrative made me ponder the current challenges we face in DevOps. Have you experienced similar sentiments?

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Chapter 2: The Value of DevOps Professionals

This video explores the reasons why DevOps engineers often earn higher salaries compared to traditional software engineers, shedding light on the value they bring to organizations.