by starkparker | 2026-01-18 06:22:37+00:00
> Like everything, the original intentions must have been noble.

It was, ca. 2012-15. Sysadmins making automation tools so they could offload the horseshit, often batshit bash/perl scripting work, of manually provisioning dev environments (on VMs, or even basic configuration of new bare metal) to devs, who were already more comfortable with writing their own automation. Devs can unblock themselves, and devs hate relying on anyone else and everyone worships and fears the devs, so fine, give them the sysadmins' rope and rafters.

Moving to a "cattle not pets" mentality for servers well before the proliferation of containers and microservices, much less the mainstreaming of serverless workflows and cloud compute. CI/CD, to make software release processes scriptable, or even better declarative, tasks that could be tested and verified in version-controlled source _before_ being deployed, just like the software itself.

Better automation and better testing meant devs could ship safer and faster; devs owning pipelines meant devs could fix dev-related problems faster.

A lot of early devops tools were written by sysadmins who were tired of being buried by rapidly growing requests to unblock developers, who were outnumbering them by the hundreds or thousands to one at FANG companies (pre-FAANG, much less the big six).

Puppet attacked config management by turning it into declarative code, Ansible made that easier to deploy; Luke Kanies and Michael DeHaan came from sysadmin. HashiCorp made VM provisioning scalable; Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto were compsci students who hated doing ops work with rudimentary early cloud services. Most of their early sales inroads into companies came from IT departments using their open-source products; most of their early evangelists were IT executives.

Google splintering devops into the SRE role they coined mostly reflected how they (thought they) had made the "devs unblocking themselves on provisioning" problem that had inspired a lot of foundation tools simply part of the dev culture, especially through GCS and k8s. They didn't think about "devops" anymore much like people don't think about breathing, and narrowed their focus onto uptime.

That was really the failure IMO, that the idea was mostly a cultural one: people working on a problem should also have a stake in, or ownership of, the things they need to unblock their work. A dev being "blocked" from dev work by IT because only IT can provision a piece of hardware or stand up a VM is a cultural problem; the largely open-source tools made by sysadmins and junior/student devs were a response to an entrenched enterprise culture that showed no interest in doing the work necessary to solve that problem.

The tools forced the culture change, but then the tools created their own culture, and the world that defined the culture also changed beneath them. But the companies built around those tools didn't want to die, so they turned devops into whatever might keep them alive.

The problem isn't that "devops" failed to do the job it set out to do (make sysadmins' lives easier), it's that the entire problem area changed so much, and so quickly, that its goal was no longer relevant. There were no "sysadmins" left to help; there are still systems, and there are still administrators, but their responsibilities have been diced up and tossed into the organizational winds.

Not quite as easy of a narrative for the founder of an ops company selling an ops product to frame in a company blog post, though. Not that things in the post are necessarily wrong, but IMO the problem isn't "devops failed", it's why the fuck are we still talking about devops? The word means nothing anymore, its massive overloading pollutes any discussion about who's having problems, what those problems are, and what the solutions to those problems might be.

Or, IMO the problem is that few to no people are asking the modern equivalent of "how do we make sysadmins' lives better?" They're instead chasing a ghost of a concept that peaked a decade ago, because that's easier than looking at an organization's failures from both a sufficiently high and low level to see the cracks that run all the way through them.