1. What is DevOps, Really?

DevOps is sold like a ’90s alt-rock ballad—hopeful, slightly overproduced, and maybe even catchy enough to make you believe. You hear the words: collaboration, automation, velocity. You see the infinite loop diagram, lovingly crafted in PowerPoint, promising flow and harmony. It sounds like freedom. Like we’ve finally figured it all out.

But then the lyrics kick in. And you realize it’s not a love song. It’s about heroin. About suffering in silence. About burnout behind a dashboard that never turns green, instead glowing a color red that doesn’t seem to exist.

Because here’s the hard truth: DevOps is not universal.

It isn’t a role. It isn’t a certification. It isn’t a tool you install and it sure as hell isn’t a “Center of Excellence” staffed by people who’ve never been on-call. DevOps is a coping mechanism. It’s the absurd, deeply personal process of helping software survive delivery—across unique terrain, through unique dysfunction, with uniquely traumatized teams.

Each company, team, and individual has their own definition of DevOps because they each have their own definition of hell.

Some teams ship once a quarter and call it CI. Others deploy every 30 minutes and haven’t slept since 2021. Some bought Kubernetes for four microservices and now maintain a petting zoo of YAML, sidecars, and grief. Many renamed “SysOps” to “Platform” and pretended it was transformation.

One size fits all? Please. DevOps doesn’t even fit one team.

Executives, ever-hopeful and slightly detached, want to package it. They want to paste a Netflix blog post on top of your legacy ERP system and wonder why it doesn’t purr like the cloud-native dream. But DevOps resists being templated—because your constraints, your culture, your chaos is uniquely yours.

What DevOps should be—when it’s not a sales pitch—is an acknowledgment:

  • That software delivery is absurd.
  • That everyone’s making it up as they go.
  • That nobody is entirely sure what the Jenkinsfile does anymore.
  • And that it’s okay to admit that.

DevOps is about finding a way forward through that absurdity without assigning blame or collecting scars. It’s not about heroics—it’s about resilience. It’s not about scale, it’s about survival.

  • Camus had Sisyphus. We have kubectl.
  • Douglas Adams had Marvin the Paranoid Android. We have #deploy-failures in Slack.
  • Kerouac had the road. We have pipelines.

And somewhere between your failing Terraform plan and that one Jira ticket from six months ago marked “WTF?”, you realize: DevOps isn’t about solving everything. It’s about learning to push the boulder together—and laughing when it inevitably rolls back down.

So what is DevOps, really?

It’s the shared recognition that software delivery is hard. That every team carries its own Herbie. And that the best we can do is automate the boring stuff, communicate honestly, and build systems that let us recover gracefully when—not if—everything goes sideways.

And if we’re lucky? We’ll get through the next release without sacrificing another engineer to the Error Budget gods.

Welcome to DevOps.

Try not to break prod.

And if you do, leave a postmortem. But make it funny.