DevOps Decrypted: Ep.28 - Have we completed DevOps? Did we defeat the final boss?

To lift him out of his funk, he’s joined by Jon and Matt, who discuss the current state of DevOps and the technology landscape. What's going on with the stalled evolution of the iPhone, with software versioning – and with monopolistic cloud services? Has the whole tech industry reached a plateau in innovation? Maybe less rapid innovation is a good thing, and stable, incremental improvement is what we really need. Join us as we talk through our tech troubles and try to overcome our overwhelming ennui.

All right. Well, Happy Monday is recording—whatever day you're listening to this. This is DevOps Decrypted.

I am not your usual host. I am a substitute as our host has taken a small leave.

We are talking about something that may also relate to feeling slumpy or not wanting to run a webinar because the world is so tired.

Have we completed DevOps? Have we defeated, like, the final boss?

Let's talk. Well, today, we have a sort of reduced panel. It's me—I'm both hosting and a panellist—and Matt Saunders and Jon Mort are also present.

And let's see.

Do we care about making a DevOps Decrypted thing today? The world is so… MLEH.

Rasmus. It's a beautiful day out there as I look out my window this September in Cambridge. And… okay. It's not. So I can understand your ennui right here. But yeah, how did we get onto this when we were planning this episode? I think it was around…

I was moaning about how innovative you are – look at the iPhone, right? And what's the like?

Yeah.

And this big razzmatazz around the iPhone. And literally, it's like… Oh, there's a bit of a better camera. Oh, when we added some buttons. And it's a bit faster, and it's a bit the battery life is a bit better, and so, and like, I don't think anybody is rushing out to stand in, stand in line, to queue up all night, to get the new iPhone. It's just a bit incrementally a bit better.

And that got us thinking: Is this the same thing with like DevOps? I would like to ask, what's the next big innovation that's coming? Or is this everything just incremental?

It felt like we went through this whole pandemic, and the world was going crazy, all these weird things. And, oh, AI, okay, all these things. And this kind of thing.

You know what? I think. We just kind of stopped and like, started squeezing things. And like, well. Yeah, okay, that was fun. Now, let's get back to normal. Get in the office, start like firing people to improve the bottom line and all that stuff. Even AI has stopped kind of innovating, ish. Maybe?

I don't know. I mean, we have to… There's a lot to unpack, there, isn't there?

I mean the new iPhone. What are we, iPhone 16, now? 17? 18? I've lost count.

Is it? Yeah, I think we were riffing on if it's the same in software. It's like, in DevOps is like everybody's got all their code in a proper GitLab or GitHub, or some sort of proper source code repository. Everyone's doing tests, CI, everyone's got cloud native environments all ready and done, and so everything that we see coming out now that's new kind of… isn't.

Or is it just that we sit at a bit of an apex of where early innovators sit? And from our perspective, the things that we're doing. You know, we're so trend-setting, we know we've been there and done that, and there's a whole load of the majority of people who haven't actually gotten to this yet.

And so the increment, the incremental tools coming out, the, you know, things that are just a little bit better than the one before, but not really. Maybe that's what those sorts of people need to get with the program.

Or is it just done? Are we just? Have we killed the final boss, and are we done?

I kind of want to blame Chrome for this, for, like, ruining version numbers.

It used to be that version 2 was like, Wow! That's amazing! And version 3?! Can we have a third version?!

And it's like, Oh, welcome to Chrome 142, which is just about as meaningful as the iPhone 16, I mean… just like what?

I see that as a success for agile and continuous delivery. It's like, you know, there's a new one that comes out every, okay… So, the schedule is probably a little bit waterfall-y. I don't know how often the new Chrome or Firefox comes out, so they do the same—I'm sticking to Firefox. I'm sorry, I'm not moving…

Use – We use other browsers, not just Chrome!

Yes, yes, exactly. Actually, I'm on. I'm on Zen Browser at the moment. But anyway, it's a Firefox derivative.

Yeah. Version 137 of Chrome…

I remember talking, probably 20 years ago, to some software devs. We were just sitting in a room for, I don't know how long it was. It felt like 4 hours discussing whether the release they were putting out should be under the rules of Semver. Actually, before this, Semver was probably a thing – should this be a major version release or a minor version release? And starting to dismantle all of the bureaucracy and, frankly, hyperbole around releases and versions.

And now, I can look back at that with hindsight of the DevOps movement of releases not being a thing any more.

And so, yeah, version 137. Yeah. So what? I don't know.

My Firefox over there. I have no idea what version I'm on. I just know that it's a new one arrives, and it's almost inevitably a non-event, which is a success for continuous delivery.

Right?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm feeling a little bit connected to that, too. I used to be a Firefox fan. I might go back. I just can't close all my tabs to switch browsers, like I can't do it!

But I am thinking about going back to Thunderbird.

Because I tried this like new proprietary paid for, some fancy like desktop organiser, and you know what?

They stopped innovating.

And then it's kind of started slowly breaking apart. And it's like, why am I using this and paying for it when I can just go back to Thunderbird?

Is that happening elsewhere? Because I hear thing about like Amazon and these fun things about what they're up to.

So, just riffing on that it's… it's weird. How, from my perspective, the world's kind of changed around a bit. It used to be like, you know, there's all this innovation going on which often happens in the open source world – one of your favourite subjects, I know, Rasmus – going back 15, 20 years or so.

And then, like, you know, open-source projects would stabilise and get boring. And at that point, people started building new and interesting things. Well, for some definition of interesting, put a price tag on them, and off you go to this commercial software there.

If that's true, I don't know if my viewpoint there is particularly objective. If that's true, has that now reversed, and are we seeing innovation happening in the open-source world again?

And that's where the interesting stuff is coming from?

I'm not sure. I think there's there's some. There are some of the business models around open source that I think are kind of interesting. How do you defend the IP that you're doing? How do you? And you've got the kind of like the open core model. And there's I don't know. We've talked about this quite a bit. But I think it becomes very problematic. So, how are you going to make money on the investment you've put in around things?

Oh, yeah, it's just, yes, it's all this like ERRR!

Elasticsearch is open source again, like what? No, that's too late. You don't get to take it back. That's crazy.

And then Sentry comes out with something called Fair Source, which is like the same thing. But we named it something else. So hopefully, we can avoid some of all the like, RRR, you took it away, you b******s! But...

Tell us a bit more about the elastic change.

Well, okay, sure. I mean, it's all over the internet. As usual, there's drama, drama, drama, because apparently, you know, originally Elasticsearch went from being open source to using one of these. I forget which ones, like business, something licence, where you can't compete against us. But sure, you can figure out the source code and contribute back so we can make money off it.

And then, you know, surprise, surprise. Nerds didn't like that.

They were doing it so that AWS couldn't just drop in their solution and sell it to their customers, which they no longer could. So, as a result, naturally, Amazon forked it and made its own version. Now, that's being used. Oddly, Elasticsearch guys are okay with that, like, yeah, okay, alright. And then they got to the point where we are OK with it now.

So we're going to make it open source again. Like, huh

But you, like, burned your community. It happens all over the place, like Redis and others. It's just… but it seems part of this whole like weird innovation cycle. And, like, squeeze things to make more money and…

Yeah. But the timing of that I found was interesting as well because they were just making it and publishing it back to them or changing it to the AGPL, just as OpenSearch was being contributed to the Linux Foundation.

That was thought that was curious timing!

Yep. Talk to me one day about Jenkins and Hudson…

It's a similar thing there. Something's going to get donated to the community that's very similar. And all of a sudden, the value proposition of the thing that you've got, which used to be open source but is now proprietary, is reduced because of a competitor coming in. Is that what we're saying?

Or a competitor coming in and making their thing open source. Is that what's happening here?

Yeah, just the community goes somewhere else. You risk losing interest in your product if you know everybody goes somewhere else, like, talk to me about Terraform. And you know all that fun stuff. It's just… I'm going to get sad, you guys; we'll have to talk about something else.

Oh, we were already sad when we came into this episode, weren't we?

Let's talk about that funny AWS thing about not being a monopoly, right? That was fun!

So that's so. It's not the big thing that everyone's talking about the RTO. Let's leave that one alone…

Yeah, no, let's not talk about any RTO on this thing unless it's a Recovery Time Objective!

Oh, yes! I like the cut of your jib, Mr. Mort!

So Amazon is not competitive, did you say, Rasmus?

Apparently!

It's weird.

So, this is the UK competition and markets authority saying that Amazon is a monopoly. I mean, there are at least four big cloud providers out there, right? So…

Yeah, I wish one-day people would take Google Cloud seriously because I love it like; just use Google Cloud and then prove to AWS that they have competitors!

And a competitor that's not people off-clouding to their on-prem equipment, being a competitor…

I find this argument fascinating because it's absolutely—I don't know—it beggars belief. This is an argument that you know, AWS shouldn't be considered a monopoly because customers are repatriating workloads, and so, therefore, they have a choice. I think it's fascinating as a whole argument.

But yeah, I think there's a… So, in my mind, I think at some point, we'll need to have an element of regulation or something and treat a public cloud as a public resource to be consumed like a utility.

I like that.

I think that would be an interesting move in the market. Let's see where and what that would do for an AWS, a GCP, or an Azure…

Yeah, it's an interesting turn of events because, I mean, you mentioned the word utility – that was the dream, wasn't it? When AWS first launched S3 like 15 years ago, whenever it was, yeah, utility computing. Let's like, get these things on demand. You can just pay for it, and there it is.

And I guess it's just a natural evolution that we get to a point where a single supplier has an undue influence over the market because they get big, because frankly, they succeed, and they do well, so yeah, I suspect it's at the point where regulators do start to get involved I think.

Certainly, in the UK, we're one step towards that, with data centres being designated as critical infrastructure by the government. So there's, you know, there are things like the electricity, the electricity grid, water, and data centres are now kind of being thrown into the mix, which I find a very interesting move because most, really like the most of the value of data centres, is the things that they run rather than them in themselves. And what's like, how do you defend a data centre where you actually have the logical part and the physical? So, just defending the physical doesn't really help that much.

Or it helps just to, you know, just just a little bit. But I think that's one step in that direction.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me a little bit of how back in the, I guess, the late nineties, the world woke up to the fact that whilst, you know, we were things like telephone networks were part of critical national infrastructure, you know, the country needs them to actually function, and then it all got very, very murky when you start having internet providers and things like well, should the Government run their own fibre everywhere, too, you know, to run government type services?

And then that thing got all mixed in with the public networks as well.

And now, yeah, here we are with, yeah, things like cloud services, the logical and the physical nature of those. And yeah, and we're highly dependent on all of them. I mean, so much of the Gov.uk stuff in the UK – the Government Digital Service is running on AWS.

In fact, probably all of it now, because they've had a mandate to do that for a very, very long time. So yeah, it's not just people watching TikToks anymore.

I kind of think in my, in the, in the back of my head, that at some point you can modernise something so much, it gets incredibly boring. And maybe Amazon is there, and whenever something new comes out like Gen. AI, the moment is a stable offering of it on AWS?

It's dead.

Like at that point. Yes, you have slain the final dragon. It's on Amazon now, it's over.

But then, if you go and use it, is it actually all it's hyped up to be for, like cloud workloads and all that? I kept coming back like, well, I mean, there are all these people going off cloud because they want to save on money.

But then, the point of them going to the cloud in the first place was to save money.

But could it be a combination of having your on-premise stuff because it's yours, cheaper, and safe—but then only using the cloud for elastic stuff?

Well, I think there's been a whole lot of cargo cult in the cloud, like there's, you know, there's a whole. We do that just because you know, with things that you expect, a bunch of benefits. And really, you don't need all of the, you know,t the resilience and things like that. So I think there's been a lot of cargo culting down that. But what I will say is I was having this conversation earlier; actually, around AWS, they do end of it like they… they ship.

So I think if you're making the argument as long as, "Is it dead if AWS has got it?" – well, I think no, because AWS ships fast. They ship a lot, and it's like, yeah, like the speed at which they had the language models in bedrock and other things. There is, I guess.

I think it's super fast, and, as you know, as an example. I think once they've figured out what the problem is—as the organisation, as large as it is—they ship pretty quickly.

And I think that one of the things that you can guarantee with them is that they will be. If there's an area of problems and your problem area aligns with them, you're going to be able to innovate with them. You'll probably also find some other providers that can do the same.

It'll cost you…

I think we need to. We need to be clear on what we mean by "dead" here. I think, correct me if I'm wrong here, Rasmus, and when you say dead, I think we're talking about where innovation is happening. You know where people are doing new and exciting. Well, not necessarily exciting, but new things and solving problems in new ways. And yeah, some things have kind of died.

But they're still there.

In fact, they're still probably even more vital than they ever were. It's like running instances, EC2 instances. We don't really talk about that any more.

Maybe it's less dead, more boring and dependable?

Yeah, it's boring and dependable. And you know, frankly, I'm all for it. You know, I want a whole load of things to be boring and dependable so that I can then think about things that are more interesting.

You know, I love being a Linux sysadmin. I still do love being a Linux sysadmin. I still mess around with that stuff on my own personal little empire running my mum's email, that sort of stuff. But the problem that I'm solving at work is not how to get an Apache server to serve up pictures of my holiday.

The world has moved on so same with what you said about AWS there, Jon, though they've been copping some flak by actually end-of-lifing some services.

Which they just haven't done. I mean, we make jokes about it. It's like a TLA soup, a three-letter acronym soup, everywhere. There are so many of these things out there that it can be really hard to navigate which ones of them to use. And yeah, historically, they haven't killed off old things – things like Code Commit are being killed off.

But the reality is that the number of services is still growing massively every reinvent, there are new things, and they're all things that are building on these old boring, dead things now, and they're innovating there and solving our problems.

We talked about saving money.

I think everybody goes to the cloud to try and save money. Nobody actually succeeds because as soon as you're there, you find all these new fancy toys that they've got that solve the problems that we ordinarily thought we had to solve.

But they've solved them. So, yeah, that's why.

So if it's less dead, more like boring and dependable, with occasional bits of neat new stuff…

Are we dead?

You're getting very, very meta here, I think. Yeah.

I think I used the word "ennui" earlier. It's like, yeah, nothing's new. Nothing isn't actually interesting—but I think we should probably celebrate that, frankly.

Because it does mean that we get to do the things that we're supposed to be doing, or we can redefine the things that we're supposed to be doing as being more kind of more business case.

It feels like maybe this is a good time to close out our depressing DevOps Decrypted episode.

Do we have enough ennui?

I'm excited! I'm going to do all these things that aren't doing all the boring things that I used to do!

Yes.

Fine.

That's fair. I am also thinking about some boring things I need to get to and enjoy.

But hey…

So, for now, I guess I will just say thank you for listening to our episode—28 of DevOps Decrypted.

Next time, we'll have Frank from BetaNXT on to discuss a particularly cool DevOps project—ooh, that'll be fun!

So feel free to comment back at devopsdecrypted@adaptavist.com and do all the usual likes and smashes of subscribe buttons. But nobody does that any more, you guys…

Don't say that! Make them do that! Yes, please do that!

Okay… just do it if you feel like it, you know. Just yeah. But yeah… have a nice day.

See you, Marvin, the paranoid Android!