With DevOpsDays approaching its 10th anniversary, this was a moment to reflect rather than predict. The pipeline had drawn almost all the attention – even though we kept saying devops was about culture and collaboration, it was the CI/CD pipeline and the automation that captured people’s imaginations. CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement, Sharing – was supposed to be balanced, but automation became the double-edged sword. It spread the message as a trojan horse, then started overtaking the message itself.
Every movement seems to follow this pattern. ITIL started with good practices and became about ticketing tools. Agile started with people and became about TDD. DevOps started with collaboration and became about the pipeline. And the tool wars did not help – people arguing whether it should be containers or serverless, as if you cannot put things in perspective and learn from what came before. It reminded me of children fighting over the flavor of the day.
The most unexpected lesson came from running my own company. We hired someone from marketing, and it turned out they felt exactly like ops used to feel – disconnected, undervalued, doing important work that nobody recognized. The same was true for sales, HR, legal, and finance. Each department had its own version of the dev-vs-ops wall. Marketing had better metrics and A/B testing than most tech teams. Finance was the ultimate test: if there is no money in the bank, the test has failed.
After five years of focusing on the dev-ops boundary, the next five years for me were about looking beyond it. DevOps was never just about two teams. It was always a metaphor for collaboration across all the silos in a company. The name happened to pick the two most visible ones, but the principles apply everywhere.
Watch on YouTube – available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.