Devops And The Future

We have come to a turning point in the evolution of the DevOps movement.

The big consulting companies have ran with the concept and built big expensive packages aimed at corporations; there are SaaS companies trying to carve out territory based on the tool chain and there are small DevOps consultancies that will go into a company and try to help them adapt their processes to be more DevOpsy.

We have the tooling side pretty much sewn up. This isn’t a bad thing. The problem we now have is the culture side; the people problem. We still are thinking in the concept of traditional organizations; of rigid hierarchies and top-down management and people mostly just being inter-changeable cogs in a giant machine.

We need to address this.

Organizations are getting bigger and more distributed. As this happens the communication overhead increases. Traditional solutions of adding a manager or team leader to a team to act as a single point of contact is starting to become inefficient when it comes to larger organizations. Each level of abstraction adds overhead, reduces transparency and reduces efficiency. We need a different way of working.

I don’t have the answers yet, but I am trying to understand the problem.