summary
In this cautionary tale, I’ll share three real-world product-building experiences, mapping my journey as a product manager from a DevOps enthusiast to a wary cynic. I’ll share examples of how infrastructure can drift into ‘purgatory’: pipelines that are ‘never done,’ painfully complex to maintain, or beautifully engineered yet devoid of applications to support. My goal is to highlight the missteps I encountered, so future teams might avoid these traps and sidestep the costly pursuit of infrastructure perfection that can derail real progress.

how the talk will unfold
Introduction: The Allure of DevOps
To bring us onto the same page - and this should not be controversial - I’ll share my attitude towards DevOps, where I see it being valuable and beneficial when building products and services.

Pitfalls: When Reality meets Ideology
Drawing on my personal experience I will share a number of examples, where despite best intentions, our DevOps endeavours, descended into, at best waste and pain, at worst total dysfunction. I will touch on aspects such as technology ‘greed’, over-engineering, gold-plating, premature optimisation, strategic misalignment and others, and show how, from excitement and enthusiasm about DevOps users, stakeholders and ‘the business’ can easily become disillusioned, cynical and frustrated.

Conclusion: The moral of the tale, advice for the real world
I will conclude with guiding principles to avoid falling into the same traps.

What participants will take away
An awareness of the important to adopt a critical view on
- DevOps (and other) technical decisions
- A list of potential pitfalls and challenges
- Actionable guidance and suggestions on how to manage these tensions, risks and challenges to avoid falling into the same traps
- An understanding that infrastructure is an important - but nevertheless - means to an end, that needs to serve a greater purpose