DevOps: The Never-Ending Story
devops.com, Thursday, January 22nd, 2026
Every few years, sometimes every few months, someone declares DevOps dead. If that sounds familiar, it should. We've been hearing some version of this refrain for more than a decade. DevOps has failed. DevOps is broken. DevOps has been replaced by insert latest shiny thing here. And yet, every time the obituary is written, DevOps stubbornly refuses to cooperate.
Which is why I want to talk about DevOps for what it really is: Not a failed movement, not a completed project, but a never-ending story.
This latest round of conversation was sparked by a smart, provocative blog post by Charity Majors, titled 'You Had One Job: Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do It.' Charity's piece struck a nerve, and rightly so. She articulated a frustration many practitioners feel: after two decades, why are so many organizations still struggling with reliability, ownership, and operational excellence?