Complexity has always part of IT and it’s increasing as we embrace microservices and highly abstracted platforms.  Making everyone cope with this challenge is unsustainable.

We’re just more aware of infrastructure complexity now that DevOps is exposing this cluster configuration to developers and automation tooling. We are also building platforms from more loosely connected open components. The benefit of customization and rapid development has the unfortunate side-effect of adding integration points. Even worse, those integrations generally require operations in a specific sequence.

The result is a developer rebellion against DevOps on low level (IaaS) platforms towards ones with higher level abstractions (PaaS) like Kubernetes.
This rebellion is taking the form of “cloud native” being in opposition to “devops” processes. I discussed exactly that point with John Furrier on theCUBE at Kubecon and again in my Messy Underlay presentation Defrag Conf.

It is very clear that DevOps mission to share ownership of messy production operations requirements is not widely welcomed. Unfortunately, there is no magic cure for production complexity because systems are inherently complex.

There is a (re)growing expectation that operations will remain operations instead of becoming a shared team responsibility.  While this thinking apparently rolls back core principles of the DevOps movement, we must respect the perceived productivity impact of making operations responsibility overly broad.

What is the right way to share production responsibility between teams?  We can start to leverage platforms like Kubernetes to hide underlay complexity and allow DevOps shared ownership in the right places.  That means that operations still owns the complex underlay and platform jobs.  Overall, I think that’s a workable diversion.