Here we are, 8+ years? after I started talking about DevOps (or something like that), and I can finally say I think that the DevOps Stack is starting to settle down. When I was actively speaking about DevOps (and the Culture of Code) I steered well clear of specific tools and technologies because it was all in flux. Nowadays, it’s pretty much a Git repo (still a fan of GitHub and GitLab), Docker, Kubernetes, and for me, Argo, to visualize how things are going and quickly cycle a pod that’s misbehaving. There are various other tools around the stack that are still getting tweaked, but these are the stalwart pieces of the puzzle that won the battles in their respective areas. 

I came to this conclusion today when having lunch with my favorite DevOps architect. There was a period where every couple of weeks he was touting the latest tool or approach and I just couldn’t keep up. I realized today it had been a while (maybe a year?) since he’d come in excited about something new in the space. When I mentioned this, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I guess you’re right.” 

Now the question is whether DevOps has truly taken hold. I think everyone in the industry is doing flavor of it, and wished they had a fully fleshed out Deployment Pipeline, but most don’t. In this regard, I think Agile was “better” adopted than DevOps in a shorter amount of time. That being said though, I do recognize that Agile, in some ways, is much easier to implement well than DevOps. There’s a lot of technical skill required to do DevOps. (I really only know one person who is great at it.) And there’s certainly a lot of effort involved. A group can say they’re agile (rightfully so) just having daily stand-ups and doing a little backlog grooming. Just putting your code in a Git repo doesn’t mean you’ve implemented DevOps. I sure hope more companies really start to dive in and revamp their approach to DevOps because I still believe that it is the true realization of Agile. Only time will tell. 

Then we can all start talking about truly implementing DevSecOps….