Are you breaking silos.. or just chaining them?

Imagine a different universe where every electronics company sells end- to-end service for their product, not just the device.

You got a refrigerator? Congratulations. You get it fully connected to Frigidaire's power supply. Refrigerate-on! You will pay per door opening.

Air conditioning? Good move. This device will be provided and powered by GE.

Is this the best way to do it? Surely, there are enough food consumers in the world to justify looking at the refrigeration challenge end-to-end. And we all know that refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, computers and air-conditioners are very different devices. Some of them, after all, are kitchen-specific.

Would you buy this?

While it’s quite clear that you want all the electronics in your house powered, you probably don’t want to mess with 234 power providers that specialize in different functions.

Not sure you want every electronics supplier to install their power outlets on your walls.

Not sure humanity would want Dyson to waste time thinking about proprietary power supply when they should be coming up with amazing new vacuuming technology. And expanding to hair dryers!

So why do you buy DevOps tool-chaining?

Your development requires some specific tools and techniques. So does your quality assurance, and your production.

But all these specific tools require application environments. If you look at it in system-level — pretty much the same application environments. They can’t each have their own approach to applications deployment and infrastructure provisioning.. That would be quite frustrating.

Next steps?

1. Start thinking about the application deployment and infrastructure provisioning challenge in system-level (it’s not necessarily your organization level)
2. Don’t expect CI/CD, test automation and security validation tools to give you a professional answer for application deployment and infrastructure provisioning. It’s not their expertise, and it really shouldn’t be — they have other important things to do
3. If anyone tells you that you have to develop application deployment and infrastructure provisioning yourself and that you need to glue tools together in order to do it (or that it will be free) — nod and move away slowly