Why Devops is more about agreements than tooling

The most expensive mistake I ever made in DevOps had nothing to do with technology. We'd spent six months building the perfect CI/CD pipeline - GitLab, Terraform, Kubernetes, the works. Every commit triggered automated tests, security scans, and deployments through three environments. It was beautiful. It was also completely useless, because the development team refused to use it. They kept shipping code through their old process: zip files over email to the ops team. The problem wasn't the tools. The problem was that we'd never agreed on what "done" meant.

This is the thing about DevOps that nobody wants to admit: it's not really about automation or infrastructure as code or any of the technical practices we love to discuss. It's about getting a room full of people with different incentives, different backgrounds, and different definitions of success to agree on how work should flow through an organization. The tools are just the easy part, the thing we do to avoid having the harder conversations.

Think about what DevOps is actually trying to solve. Before DevOps became a movement, we had developers who wanted to ship features quickly and operations people who wanted to keep systems stable. These aren't contradictory goals, exactly, but they create tension. Developers get rewarded for change; operations gets punished for it. So we built walls. Developers threw code over the wall to QA, QA threw it over the wall to operations, and operations threw it into production while praying nothing would break. DevOps promised to tear down these walls. But here's what's interesting: the walls weren't technical. They were organizational. They were made of ticket systems and approval processes and job descriptions that said "your responsibility ends here." You can't solve organizational problems with technical solutions, no matter how elegant your pipeline is.

The real work of DevOps happens in conference rooms, not terminals. It happens when a developer sits down with an operations engineer and they hash out what "production-ready" actually means. When they agree that tests need to pass, but also agree on which tests. When they decide together that deployments happen at 2 PM, not 2 AM, because they're both going to be responsible if something goes wrong. These agreements are harder than configuring Jenkins. They require admitting that your previous way of working wasn't perfect. They require developers to care about operational concerns like monitoring and rollback procedures. They require operations people to accept that some amount of risk is necessary for the business to move forward. Most importantly, they require both sides to see themselves as part of the same team with the same goals.

I've seen organizations spend millions on DevOps transformations that failed because they focused on tools instead of agreements. They'd bring in consultants who would set up elaborate CI/CD pipelines, containerize everything, and implement infrastructure as code. Then the consultants would leave, and within six months everything would revert to the old way of working. The tools would sit there, unused or worked around, like expensive monuments to what could have been. The successful transformations I've seen always started with agreements. Simple ones at first: "We agree that every change goes through version control." Not because Git is magic, but because it creates a single source of truth that both developers and operations can see. "We agree that deployments are automated." Not because automation is inherently better, but because it makes the deployment process visible and repeatable.


These agreements create trust. When deployments are automated, operations stops being the gatekeeper who might say no at the last minute. When all changes go through version control, developers stop worrying that operations will make undocumented changes to production. Trust lets you move faster than any tool ever could. But agreements are fragile. They require constant maintenance. I've watched strong DevOps cultures fall apart when a new manager came in who didn't understand the agreements that made everything work. They'd see developers deploying to production and panic. They'd add approval gates. They'd split the team back into developers and operations. Within months, the walls would be back up, stronger than ever.

This is why DevOps is so hard to copy. You can copy Netflix's tools, plenty of companies have tried. You can implement their Chaos Monkey, use their Spinnaker deployment platform, adopt their microservices architecture. But you can't copy the agreements that make those tools effective. You can't copy the trust that lets engineers deploy code to production hundreds of times a day. You can't copy the shared understanding of what risks are acceptable.

The tools aren't even the hard part of the agreement. The hard part is agreeing on who does what when something goes wrong. Traditional operations teams were on-call 24/7 because they were responsible for everything in production. But if developers are deploying their own code, shouldn't they be responsible when it breaks? This is where DevOps gets political. It's easy to say "you build it, you run it" in a blog post. It's harder when it means waking developers up at 3 AM. Some organizations solve this by making developers truly responsible for their services in production. Others create SRE teams that work closely with developers but handle the operational burden. Others rotate developers through operations roles. There's no right answer, but there must be an answer. Without agreement on who's responsible, you don't have DevOps, you have chaos.

The most successful DevOps transformation I ever saw started with a single agreement: "We will deploy every Friday at 3 PM." That's it. No continuous deployment, no fancy automation. Just a regular schedule that everyone could plan around. Developers knew when their code would go live. Operations knew when to be extra vigilant. Customer support knew when to expect changes. From that simple agreement, others grew. If we're deploying every Friday, we need to make sure the code is tested by Thursday. If we're testing on Thursday, we need the code merged by Wednesday. Slowly, the entire organization began to move in rhythm. The tools came later, automation to make the Friday deploy reliable, monitoring to catch problems early, feature flags to reduce risk. But the tools were serving the agreement, not the other way around. This is what we miss when we talk about DevOps as a technical practice. We focus on the visible artifacts, the pipelines, the automation, the infrastructure as code. But these are just the physical manifestation of something deeper: a set of agreements about how work should flow, who's responsible for what, and what we value as an organization.

When DevOps fails, it's usually not because the tools weren't good enough. It's because the agreements weren't strong enough. Because when pressure mounted, when the big release was due, when the critical bug hit production, when the important customer complained - we reverted to our old patterns. Developers threw code over the wall. Operations threw up gates to protect themselves. The tools sat unused while we fought the same battles we'd always fought. The irony is that we need the pressure to test our agreements. It's easy to follow DevOps practices when everything is going well. It's when things go wrong that you find out if the agreements hold. Do developers really take responsibility for their code in production? Does operations really trust the automated pipeline? Do we actually value learning from failures, or do we just want someone to blame?

This is why I've become skeptical of DevOps tools and frameworks that promise transformation. They're selling the easy part. They're selling the thing you can buy and implement without having to have difficult conversations about responsibility and trust and what kind of organization you want to be. But you can't buy your way to DevOps any more than you can buy your way to a good marriage. Both require the hard work of building agreements and maintaining them over time. The next time someone tells you they're implementing DevOps, ask them about their agreements, not their tools. Ask them who's on-call when the application breaks. Ask them how they decide what gets deployed and when. Ask them what happens when a deployment goes wrong. The answers will tell you more about their DevOps maturity than any discussion of their CI/CD pipeline ever could. Because in the end, DevOps isn't about automating deployments or infrastructure as code or any of the technical practices we associate with it. It's about creating agreements that allow people with different skills and different perspectives to work together effectively. The tools are just what we use to implement those agreements. Without the agreements, the tools are just expensive toys.

That pipeline we built, the one the developers refused to use? We eventually made it work. Not by making the pipeline better, but by sitting down with the development team and asking what would make them trust it. Turns out they didn't understand how rollbacks worked. They didn't know who would be paged if something went wrong. They didn't trust that their hotfixes could bypass the normal process in an emergency.

So we made agreements. We documented the rollback process and tested it together. We agreed on an on-call rotation that included both developers and operations. We created an emergency deployment process that everyone understood. Only then did the pipeline become useful. Only then did we actually have DevOps.

The tools were the same, but the agreements made all the difference.