Why DevOps Needs More Operations

DevOps has an identity problem.

Somewhere along the way, “DevOps” got interpreted as:

“Developers doing infra work.”

That’s not DevOps. That’s just… developers doing ops tasks badly, until someone gets paged.

DevOps only works when Operations is strong.

Not glorified. Not “respected” in a company values slide deck.

Funded. Staffed. Given real authority.

Here are the three reasons, in plain operator language.

1) Ops is the foundation

If your operations layer is weak, everything built on top of it is fragile:

  • unreliable environments
  • inconsistent deployments
  • flaky observability
  • “it works on my machine” incidents turned into “it worked in staging” incidents

Ops is the part that makes the system:

  • repeatable
  • observable
  • recoverable

No ops foundation = no DevOps culture. Just chaos with YAML.

2) Ops is what makes you scalable and resilient

At small scale, you can brute force.

At real scale, you can’t.

Ops is where resilience lives:

  • capacity planning
  • failure domains
  • blast radius control
  • backups and restore drills
  • sane on-call

If you want “high velocity,” you don’t get it by pushing harder.

You get it by building platforms that don’t fall over.

Speed without resilience is just accelerating toward downtime.

3) Ops is (often) your security team, whether you like it or not

A lot of companies don’t have a mature security org.

So ops ends up owning:

  • identity and access control
  • network guardrails
  • secrets handling
  • patching and vulnerability response
  • incident response when something goes sideways

If ops isn’t real, security becomes:

  • a quarterly audit scramble
  • a pile of findings nobody owns
  • “we’ll fix it later” until later is a breach

Security is an operations problem first. Tools are second.

Bottom line

DevOps isn’t “more development.”

DevOps is:

  • dev and ops working like one team
  • with ops-grade rigor behind the platform

If you starve operations, you don’t get DevOps.

You get burnout, hero culture, and a pager that never stops.

FAQ

Q: What’s the difference between DevOps and platform engineering?

A: DevOps is a culture and set of practices that bridge development and operations. Platform engineering is a specific discipline within DevOps that focuses on building internal developer platforms: self-service tooling that abstracts infrastructure complexity. While all platform engineers do DevOps, not all DevOps practitioners are platform engineers. Platform engineering is DevOps with a product mindset toward infrastructure.

Q: Should DevOps teams report to engineering or operations?

A: The best DevOps teams have shared ownership, but the operational mindset should dominate. Whether reporting to engineering or operations, DevOps teams need operational rigor: incident response procedures, change management, and production accountability. Pure engineering culture often prioritizes features over stability, which can undermine DevOps goals.

Q: Why do many “DevOps” implementations fail?

A: Most failures stem from treating DevOps as a tooling problem rather than an operational discipline. Success requires investment in operational fundamentals: observability, incident management, capacity planning, and change control. Organizations that skip these foundations end up with fast deployment pipelines that break production faster.