Don't get hit with the pendulum: DevOps shifted too far left

You probably wouldn’t be surprised if I told you modern networking based on open source projects like Istio, SPIFFE, Cilium and others (See my paper about the CAKES stack) are typically consumed by what we now call “platform engineering” teams. You’ve probably heard the term platform engineering or seen some nice write-ups on it (like the one from my industry colleague Daniel Bryant).

At Solo.io working with our partners and customers, we get to see some of the important details about how platform engineering teams emerge, how they get funded, how they work with other parts of the organization and some of the opportunities and challenges they’ve run into. Through this, I’ve observed something worth saying out loud: just like other examples of large pendulum swings in our industry, DevOps has introduced a large swing in a direction that doesn’t produce desired outcomes at large organizations: shifting too far left.

Let’s recall that DevOps is a movement that attempts to break down silos in IT organizations to improve delivery speed and quality of software. A lot of beneficial practices emerged from DevOps including a focus on automation, improving communication between teams, and trying to shift certain delivery activities “to the left”, ie, closer to development. For example, introducing quality testing, vulnerability scanning, security testing, et. al. closer to the time code is built and tested instead of farther down the delivery pipeline (to the right). Accounting for these non-functional requirements closer to development creates a tighter feedback loop and reduces the cost of delivery because it’s cheaper to correct any issues earlier in the delivery pipeline.

Leave a Comment