DevOps Is a Culture, Not a Team: What I've Learned Building at Scale
· 13 min read
Every organization that has gone through a "DevOps transformation" in the last decade has a story. Most of those stories end the same way: they hired a DevOps team, bought a set of tools, and then wondered why things didn't meaningfully change.
I've been building and running infrastructure at scale for 20 years — from private cloud on OpenStack at eBay to managing 200+ Kubernetes clusters, 50,000 nodes, and 5,000+ applications. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the most common implementation of DevOps is actually an anti-pattern.
Let me explain what I mean.