After more than a decade architecting CI/CD pipelines and guiding teams through digital transformations, I still get asked one question over and over: ‘Is DevOps dying?’ The anxiety really spiked after Platform Con 2022, when the buzz around platform engineering exploded and headlines declared, ‘DevOps is dead.’ Suddenly, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, and think pieces were everywhere, fueling the panic.
Here’s the reality: DevOps isn’t dying—it’s evolving. The tools are more sophisticated, the practices more mature, and yes, new terminology has entered the conversation. But saying ‘DevOps is dead’ is like saying smartphones killed communication. The goal is still the same—connect development and operations. Only the way we do it has changed.
Why Are People Saying "DevOps is Dead"?
The "DevOps is dead" narrative didn't appear from nowhere. It emerged from real frustrations and market shifts that deserve examination.
Reason | What's Happening | Reality Check |
Platform Engineering | New teams building IDPs, abstracting complexity | It's DevOps evolution, not replacement |
AI tools writing code, handling deployments | AI amplifies DevOps, doesn't replace thinking | |
Job Title Chaos | Role confusion, bootcamp saturation | Growing pains of mainstream adoption |
Reason 1: Platform Engineering is Taking Over
Platform engineering exploded into the DevOps world, promising all those things DevOps got wrong. Rather than every team reinventing the wheel, platform teams construct internal developer platforms (IDPs) that abstract away the complexity. Developers get self-service capabilities without needing to master Kubernetes orchestration or Terraform scripts. This sounds revolutionary until you realize it's exactly what mature DevOps organizations have been building for years. Those claiming DevOps is dead miss this crucial connection.
The confusion arises from equating DevOps-the-philosophy with DevOps-the-job-title. Whatever the firms claim by saying that they are replacing DevOps with platform engineering, they normally just rearrange teams. Are the platforms being built by these engineers? They practice DevOps. The Infrastructure as Code, automated tests, and continuous deployment—all DevOps disciplines. Platform engineering is not killing DevOps; DevOps has reached its logical endpoint. We've moved from teaching everyone to fish to building sustainable fishing systems. That's evolution, not extinction. Saying DevOps is dead because of platform engineering is a fundamental misunderstanding of both concepts.
Reason 2: AI is Automating Everything
The AI revolution hit DevOps hard, leading many to declare DevOps is dead. GitHub Copilot writes infrastructure code. ChatGPT debugs yaml files. Automated tools handle deployment rollbacks without human intervention. Seeing AI handle tasks that once required senior engineers, people assume DevOps is dying. But here's what they miss: someone needs to architect these systems, validate AI outputs, and handle the 20% of problems AI can't solve.
I just saw an AI engine produce an ideal CI/CD pipeline within a few minutes. Impressive, that is, until it attempted to deploy to an old system with unspoken dependencies. The AI proved a crash-and-burn case. A DevOps engineer quickly resolved it within an hour, grasping the background that no AI ever had. AI enhances DevOps abilities; it does not substitute the DevOps thought process. We're not being automated away—we're being elevated to solve harder problems. The mundane tasks disappear, leaving strategy, architecture, and complex problem-solving. Those saying DevOps is dead because of AI fundamentally misunderstand both technologies.
Reason 3: Job Title Confusion and Market Saturation
Another factor fueling the "DevOps is dead" narrative is the chaos around job titles and market saturation. Every company now has different interpretations of what a DevOps engineer does. Some treat it as rebranded system administration, others as cloud engineering, and many as a catch-all for anyone touching infrastructure. This confusion diluted the role's meaning, making people question if DevOps ever existed as a distinct discipline.
The bootcamp explosion made things worse. Suddenly, twelve-week programs promised to transform anyone into a DevOps engineer, flooding the market with candidates who could spell Kubernetes but couldn't explain container orchestration. Experienced practitioners watched quality plummet and salaries stagnate in certain markets. When you see unqualified people calling themselves DevOps engineers, it's easy to think the field has lost credibility. But this isn't DevOps dying—it's the growing pains of a discipline becoming mainstream. Every technical field experiences this maturation cycle.
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The Reality of DevOps
Let's move past speculation and examine actual data. The reality contradicts the "DevOps is dead" narrative completely.
Changes and Transformations
DevOps is transforming, not terminating, despite claims that DevOps is dead. The shift from DevOps-as-a-role to DevOps-as-a-culture finally happened. Instead of designated "DevOps engineers," we see SRE specialists, platform engineers, and cloud architects—all practicing DevOps principles. The tools evolved, too. GitOps practices replaced manual deployments. Service meshes handle what custom scripts once managed. Observability platforms provide insights that require weeks of log diving.
The biggest transformation? DevOps became boring—in the best way. Continuous integration isn't revolutionary anymore; it's table stakes. Automated deployments aren't innovative; they're expected. This normalization proves success, not failure. When practices become so standard that they're invisible, they've won. DevOps principles are now embedded in how modern software gets built. Saying "DevOps is dead" is like saying "quality assurance is dead" because testing has become everyone's responsibility. The practice evolved beyond needing evangelism. Those still claiming DevOps is dead simply don't understand this evolution.
Current State of DevOps in the Market
The numbers tell a different story than the headlines claiming DevOps is dead. According to the 2025 State of DevOps Report by Puppet, 87% of organizations increased their DevOps investments last year. That's not what happens to dying practices. The global DevOps market, valued at $10.9 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $25.5 billion by 2028, growing at 24.2% annually (Markets and Markets, 2025). Companies aren't abandoning DevOps—they're doubling down. These statistics directly refute claims that DevOps is dead.
The job market reinforces this trend, contradicting every "DevOps is dead" prediction. LinkedIn's 2025 Jobs on the Rise report lists DevOps engineer as the 4th fastest-growing role globally, with 35% year-over-year growth. Salaries keep climbing, too. The average DevOps engineer in the US now earns $135,000, up 12% from 2023 (Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2025). Dead practices don't command premium salaries. What we're witnessing isn't death—it's maturation. The gold rush phase ended. Now comes sustainable growth.
Real Case Studies of Companies Investing in DevOps
Let's examine how industry leaders actually approach DevOps, beyond the conference talks and blog posts claiming DevOps is dead.
Netflix Still Invests in DevOps
Netflix, the poster child for DevOps excellence , continues to make massive investments in DevOps practices. Their 2025 Engineering Blog reveals they deployed 4,000 times daily last quarter, up from 3,500 in 2024. They didn't achieve this by declaring DevOps is dead—they refined their practices. Their Spinnaker deployment platform, used by thousands of companies, received $50 million in additional funding for development.
What Netflix understands: DevOps principles scale. Their "full cycle developers" own services from conception to production—pure DevOps philosophy. They eliminated the DevOps team title but embedded DevOps practices everywhere. Every engineer learns deployment, monitoring, and operational excellence. This isn't abandoning DevOps; it's achieving DevOps nirvana where the practices become indistinguishable from engineering itself. Netflix proves DevOps is dead wrong as a prediction.
Spotify's DevOps Transformation
Spotify's journey exemplifies why "long live DevOps" makes more sense than "DevOps is dying." Their famous "Squad" model put DevOps at each team's core. In 2025, they reorganized again—not away from DevOps, but deeper into it. Their platform teams provide golden paths, not gates. Developers deploy independently while platform teams ensure reliability and security.
Their backstage.io platform, open-sourced in 2020, became the foundation for countless internal developer platforms. It embodies DevOps principles: automation, self-service, and continuous improvement. Spotify's CPO recently stated: "We don't have DevOps engineers because everyone is a DevOps engineer." That's not death; that's victory. The philosophy became so integral that separating it from general engineering became impossible. Spotify's success story alone debunks the "DevOps is dead" myth.
Amazon's DevOps at Scale
Amazon Web Services runs on DevOps principles at unprecedented scale. Their 2025 re: Invent keynote highlighted deploying changes every 11.7 seconds across their global infrastructure. They achieve this through extreme DevOps practices: everything automated, everything monitored, everything recoverable. Their "two-pizza teams" own entire services, embodying DevOps culture.
What's fascinating: Amazon doesn't talk about DevOps anymore. Not because it's dead, but because it's assumed. Like electricity or internet connectivity, DevOps practices became invisible infrastructure. Their builders' library shares DevOps wisdom without using the term. They've transcended the need for labels while implementing DevOps principles more thoroughly than ever. When something becomes this fundamental, people stop naming it—they just do it. Amazon's approach shows why "DevOps is dead" misses the point entirely.
What are the Pros and Cons of DevOps?
Let's honestly assess DevOps in 2025—the genuine advantages and legitimate challenges.
Advantages: What's Working Well?
DevOps delivers measurable value. Organizations with mature DevOps practices deploy 208 times more frequently with 106 times faster lead time (DORA Metrics, 2025). DevOps delivers measurable value across multiple dimensions:
Deployment Frequency: Organizations with mature DevOps practices deploy 208 times more frequently with 106 times faster lead time (DORA Metrics, 2025). That's not marginal improvement—it's transformation.
Cultural Success: The culture shift succeeded beautifully. Developers understanding operations, operators writing code—this cross-pollination created resilient systems and empathetic teams that solve problems collaboratively.
Speed Revolution: Cloud-native DevOps eliminated traditional bottlenecks. Provisioning servers once took weeks; now it's minutes. Scaling applications required extensive planning; now it's automatic based on demand.
Security Integration: DevSecOps caught vulnerabilities earlier in the development cycle, reducing breach costs by 65% for early adopters (IBM Security Report, 2025). Security became everyone's responsibility, not an afterthought.
Tool Maturity: Modern CI/CD pipelines self-heal, roll back automatically, and provide insights that previous generations couldn't imagine. We solved problems that seemed impossible a decade ago.
Business Impact: Companies report 23% faster time-to-market for new features and 60% reduction in downtime incidents after implementing mature DevOps practices.
Disadvantages: What's Not Working?
However, DevOps faces real challenges. Complexity explosion tops the list. The average DevOps toolchain includes 40+ tools (SlashData, 2025), creating cognitive overload. However, DevOps faces real challenges that we must acknowledge:
Complexity Overload: The average DevOps toolchain includes 40+ tools (SlashData, 2025), creating cognitive overload. Engineers spend more time managing tools than solving actual business problems.
Role Inflation: The "DevOps engineer" role became impossibly broad—expecting expertise in coding, infrastructure, security, networking, and databases. That's not a job; it's five jobs compressed into one title.
Alert Fatigue: Observability tools generate thousands of alerts daily, most of which are insignificant. Teams become numb to notifications, missing critical signals in the noise of false positives.
Skills Gap Crisis: Organizations desperately need DevOps expertise but can't find or afford it. The talent shortage drives salaries up while quality varies wildly across candidates.
Bootcamp Dilution: Twelve-week programs flooded the market with underprepared candidates who know tool names but lack a fundamental understanding. This dilution damaged DevOps' reputation, fueling "DevOps is dead" narratives.
Cultural Resistance: Traditional enterprises with deep silos struggle to adopt DevOps culture. Legacy processes, risk-averse leadership, and change resistance slow transformation efforts.
Burnout Risk: The always-on nature of DevOps, combined with on-call duties and constant learning requirements, leads to high burnout rates among practitioners.
Bottom Line: Where is DevOps Heading?
After twelve years in this field, I can confidently say DevOps isn’t dead, dying, or even sick—it’s evolving into something stronger. What we’re seeing is not the end of DevOps, but its specialization. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, we now have FinDevOps for financial services, MLOps for machine learning, and DataOps for data pipelines. Each adapts core DevOps principles to its own domain, proving their versatility—not their obsolescence. Automation is accelerating, with AI taking over routine tasks so humans can focus on architecture and strategy. The “platform as product” mindset is gaining ground, treating developers as customers of internal platforms. Security is no longer an afterthought—DevSecOps is simply how we build software. Edge computing demands DevOps practices for managing distributed systems.
Most importantly, the philosophy behind DevOps—continuous improvement, automation, and collaboration—will outlive the label itself. Titles may change, tools will keep evolving, but the principles are now baseline expectations. What started as a movement is now the default way of building modern software. That isn’t failure—it’s success. And for anyone entering the field, I can assure you: investing in DevOps training is still one of the smartest choices you can make, because the principles you learn will remain invaluable, no matter what name they go by tomorrow.
FAQs
Q1: Is DevOps still a good career choice in 2025 and beyond?
Absolutely. DevOps engineers remain among the highest-paid tech roles with 35% job growth year-over-year. Even as titles evolve, the skills remain in massive demand.
Q2: What's the difference between DevOps and Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is DevOps evolution—building internal platforms using DevOps principles. Platform engineers are essentially DevOps engineers focused on creating self-service infrastructure.
Q3: Will AI replace DevOps engineers?
No. AI automates routine tasks but can't replace strategic thinking, complex problem-solving, or understanding the business context that DevOps professionals provide.
Q4: Should I learn DevOps or Platform Engineering?
Learn DevOps principles first. Platform engineering builds upon DevOps foundations. You can't effectively build platforms without understanding the practices they enable.
Q5: Why do some companies say they're "moving beyond DevOps"?
They're usually maturing past needing dedicated DevOps roles because DevOps practices have become embedded throughout their engineering culture. That's DevOps success, not abandonment.
