DevOps Is Bullshit (2022)
This is one of those rare articles about DevOps that isn&#x27;t bullshit. The irony...!<p>This part, while true, bothers me:<p><i>&quot;Simple, just hire some more frontend and backend engineers to develop a great internal PaaS with all the golden paths your operations team is architecting while you are trying to build your actual product that runs on top of it.&quot;</i><p>I&#x27;ve been on that team, multiple times. It doesn&#x27;t really work, because it&#x27;s yet another silo, and it takes years to bear fruit. We shouldn&#x27;t be developing platforms, we should be buying them.<p>It&#x27;s like building and running a factory so you can have an assembly line to make widgets. Most people who want to make widgets today actually contract that out to a company in China who already runs a factory where they adjust their tooling to make your widgets. That&#x27;s what economies of scale and specialization do: you pay somebody else to do the hard, expensive thing that isn&#x27;t a core part of your business. You get to market faster, you waste less money, and carry less risk.<p>We&#x27;re doing business wrong. You should not be building factories, you should be hiring a factory.<p>Do I mean &quot;hire consultants?&quot; No. What we need doesn&#x27;t seem to exist. We need companies who do white glove integration of a software product with a bespoke PaaS. Like Heroku, but with more attention to architecture, monitoring, alerting, security, ci&#x2F;cd, etc. Someone who will give you the tools, train your people, do integration alongside them, and provide support. And they could do this on a cloud account that the customer owns, with IAM guardrails to prevent them fucking up the platform.<p>There is no value added to your product by building a factory. You might reduce cost, eventually, if your business is huge enough. But there&#x27;s a small number of such businesses out there, and yours likely isn&#x27;t one of them. So let&#x27;s start some platform companies and make those the default choice.