Charity’s latest post, Bring back ops pride, is an excellent discussion (rant?) on the importance of operations for software systems and why it’s a bad idea to try and pretend it isn’t a real concern, or make conventional application teams do the work in addition to their regular job.
“Operations” is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can’t write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.
You should absolutely go read the full piece, as well as Charity’s earlier post on the Honeycomb blog: You had one job: Why twenty years of DevOps has failed to do it.
Below find several pull quotes from the post itself, because there were just too many to choose from.
The difference between “dev” and “ops” is not about whether or not you can write code. Dude, it’s 2026: everyone writes software.
The difference between dev and ops is a separation of concerns.
The hardest technical challenges and the long, stubborn tail of intractable problems have always been on the infrastructure side. That’s why we work so hard to try not to have them—to solve them by partnerships, cloud computing, open source, etc. Anything is better than trying to build them again, starting over from scratch. We know the cost of new code in our bones.
As I have said a thousand times: the closer you get to laying bits down on disk, the more conservative (and afraid) you should be.
The difference between dev and ops isn’t about writing code or not. But there are differences. In perspective, priorities, and (often) temperament.
I touched on a number of these in the article I just wrote on feedback loops, so I’m not going to repeat myself here.
The biggest difference I did not mention is that they have different relationships with resources and definitions of success.
Infrastructure is a cost center. You aren’t going to make more money if you give ten laptops to everyone in your company, and you aren’t going to make more money by over-spending on infrastructure, either. Great operations engineers and architects never forget that cost is a first class citizen of their engineering decisions.
Operational rigor and excellence are not, how shall I say this…not yet something you can take for granted in the tech industry. The most striking thing about the 2025 DORA report was that the majority of companies report that AI is just adding more chaos to a system already defined by chaos. In other words, most companies are bad at ops.