What is a week on Reddit without a little bit of controversy? Looking forward to hearing your takes on this week’s topic 😉 Comment below with your best arguments.

Let’s get bakin’ 🥐

DevOps is dead...

And it’s because devs don’t want to do ops.

To be fair, it actually depends on who you ask. As you can see from the poll I ran on Twitter yesterday, devs are divided: 41.8% of respondents said yes, 42.1% said no, and 16.1% were indifferent. This Reddit thread also highlights the strong and conflicting opinions in the community.

And that’s why DevOps, as many organizations chose to implement it, is in crisis. When teams don’t agree, forcing everyone to DevOps a certain way can have disastrous consequences.

The strain the “you build it, you run it” paradigm can put on developers has forced many teams to reconsider how they’re allocating responsibilities. On one hand, self-service capabilities are essential to moving quickly and efficiently. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of the cloud native world, freedom without boundaries can create too much pressure on operations and become counterproductive.

As Gartner analyst Lydia Leong puts it, it’s important to remember that “developer control over infrastructure isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Responsibility can be divided across the application lifecycle, so that you can get benefits from ‘you build it, you run it’ without necessarily parachuting your developers into an untamed and unknown wilderness and wishing them luck in surviving because it’s ‘not an infrastructure and operations team problem’ anymore.”

The answer to this lies in platform engineering. Platform engineers build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that abstracts away complex infrastructure configurations (among other things) so that developers don’t have to worry about them. Successful IDPs provide golden paths for developers that provide a path of least resistance for day-to-day tasks and have best security practices built-in. At the same time, IDPs preserve developer freedom to go off-road when necessary.

⚖️ Why does platform engineering strike a better balance between freedom and structure?

It’s because good platforms are treated like products. Successful platform teams conduct user research, create a product roadmap, solicit regular feedback, and market their platform internally. All of this ensures that the platform is actually reducing cognitive load and striking the right balance between developers’ needs for self-service and support.

And that’s why DevOps is dead. Long live platform engineering. 😉

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 Should you go multi-cloud? Lisa Karlin Curtis explores the nuances of handling third-party provider outages. Worth the read.

🥐 Golden paths are a key element for engineering teams to perform well. Alex Bikfalvi, Product Lead at Adevinta, shared his insights from building an internal developer platform and how it helped. The full talk can be found here.

🥐 Platform engineering made it to Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies! This FutureCIO article dives in deeper to the transformational potential of emerging technologies.

🥐 Product demos can become a pain in the 🍑. April Dunford shares some tips for making an impactful demo. Check the full 🧵on Twitter here.

🥐 You already know what time it is 😉

That's a wrap on #3. Like what you read? Share it with your friends.

Btw, we have some really amazing DevOps is Dead news coming very soon.. stay tuned.

And stay crunchy 🥐

Luca