DevOps isn't a job. DevOps is a system to work with people directly and find out what they need and give them things that enable them to get their job done fast

DevOps isn't a job. DevOps is a system to work with people directly and find out what they need and give them things that enable them to get their job done faster, while also getting enough information to make sure the product stays online and reliable. What people call "a DevOps role" today is just sysadmin or sysop or syseng or SRE. Back in the day we cobbled together solutions out of different parts because it gave us a strategic advantage over monolithic commercial solutions. It was cheaper, but it was also easy to customize and fit to product & user needs. Yes configuration management was a nightmare, and it came back from the dead as Terraform, because instead of an OS with mutable state we now have a Cloud with mutable state. Docker and Packer and a few other solutions have fixed a lot of the mutable state issues, but databases are still flawed and SaaS is still just a mucky mess of unversioned mutable state and nonstandard uncomposeable poorly documented APIs. With Kubernetes, we're back in the land of commercial monolithic products. Technically you can build it yourself and customize it all, but it's expensive and time consuming and difficult because of how many components there are tied together. It "gives you everything you need" the way the International Space Station does. Do you need a space station, or a barn? People get so wrapped up in terminology. Declarative doesn't mean anything other than "not procedural"; it's not better than procedural, it's just different. Plenty of declarative things are a tire fire. Infrastructure as Code just means "there is some code that is committed to git that can manage my servers". A shell script calling AWS CLI is IaC. Doesn't make it a good solution. You can't just install a piece of software and be done. That's the entire point of the DevOps movement, really. It's not about what you use, it's all about how you use it. Work with humans to figure out what will work for your specific situation. Use your brain. Don't just install some software because it's trendy and hope it will fix all your problems.