DevOps is Broken

When we ask "Is DevOps dead" we hear: "No, but it transformed into Platform Engineering". OK, but that's Ops, not DevOps. What happened to "You Build It, You Run It" and the "Break down the silos" promises?

Is DevOps dead? The organizers of DevOpsDays Denmark experienced a severe drop in interest in participating in this year’s DevOpsDays conference. It is now cancelled, and the Danish DevOpsDays Association must review its bylaws.

What is happening

Despite the fact that DoD usually pulls a decent crowd, this year’s conference showed odd signs of inconsistency and misbehavior:

• We had plenty of people who wanted to speak at the conference
• We had more sponsor requests than ever seen in our 8-year history
• We had no sign-ups at early-bird rates
• And only 7 sign-ups since the program was announced

We kicked off a LinkedIn discussion and sent out a questionnaire to 555 previous DoD attendees asking “What is happening - is DevOps dead?”

In contrast to the missing sign-ups, we got a lot of feedback. I’ll try to summarize:

DevOps is not dead, but it has transformed into platform engineering, IaC, and tool-oriented Ops rather than a Dev-focused practice, and this realm is already quite well covered and organized by the Cloud Native Foundation community.

The socio-technical systems focus that defined DevOps in the early years of the movement has no clear “new home.” The DORA agenda, together with DevX and agentic AI, each covers bits and parts of it.

Former participants mostly report that they “cannot convince managers to take two days off for a DevOps agenda”.

A few memorable (and opinionated, but probably true’ish) comments from the questionnaire:

“DevOps conferences have turned into a gathering of platform engineering people. It’s not Dev and Ops coming together it’s Ops turned into DevOps turned into Platform Engineering. It’s like pretending SAFe is Agile.”

 

“I don’t think DevOps is dead. I think the world is on fire and everyone worries about having a job and not about going to yet another conference.”

 

“To me DevOps is nowadays something I expect people to study and know about but we don’t use the word in our teams anymore. I think what is currently interesting — and will be even more with the introduction of LLMs — is the people side. People in tech.”

What is Next?

Well, first of all, we hereby announce:

The conference on April 28+29 is off - it’s cancelled.

The sponsors and the few sign-ups we had will, of course, be refunded - no questions asked.

Other than that here’s our draft playbook for the future:

• The board of the Danish DevOpsDays Association will hold an extraordinary meeting on April 9 to discuss a new purpose and revised bylaws. We expect to meet again in late April or early May to formalize new statutes.
• The sentiment, and what will most likely happen, is that we will rename and rebrand the association. This may include disassociation from DevOpsDays charter and organization.
• The overall purpose stays “People in Tech”, and the association will continue to drive community discussions on “What the heck is going on in tech these days.”
• We will transform from an annual 2-day conference into … something else. We want to lean toward smaller but more frequent events: Open Space sessions, Lean Coffee meetings, and workshops, based on our interpretation of the feedback that discussion and sharing spaces are what people need most.
• It’s likely that we will put additional focus on digital content (slack content, video recordings of presentations and demos, audio recorded interviews and discussions, blog posts).
• We will continue to have an annual main event - but it will be very different (details not decided yet)
• We will still have presence in both Aarhus and Copenhagen.
• We will still have sponsors, so we will remain in a position to drive and support the community financially and to produce high quality content.
• We will remain a non-profit organization.
• The content will be entirely free.
• Our aim is that the events will also be entirely free for participants - occasionally with a small “catering fee”.

These are not the new purpose or bylaws - yet. But they are a glimpse into what is cooking.

If this sounds interesting

You should definitely join our slack.

If you wish to take part in - and contribute to - this transition into something new, consider joining the organizers’ team and making your voice heard there.