Weekly Journal 65 - Tools vs. Solutions

Tools vs. Solutions

This week I have been doing some thinking about the current state of DevOps practices. One of the things that keeps popping up is what I call the lack of solutions in the DevOps space. There are lots of tools that help to implement and codify DevOps practices and processes, but they all require additional customization and integration with other tools in order to be useful. While I personally think it’s fun to do that integration work, at the end of the day it doesn’t add value to the product itself. I think it’s well worth the time investment, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to do that work.

I think there is real opportunity out there to build around some these tools in order to provide a complete solution vs. a box full of tools. For example, Kubernetes is a fantastic container orchestration tool, but it is also very complicated. Even hosted versions like those provided by the major cloud providers require a large investment of time and effort in order to use them properly. I think there is an opportunity to take a tool like Kubernetes and add a highly opinionated workflow around it. The idea here is that users would have the option of trading flexibility for a much simpler process.

I’m interested to see if anybody takes a stab at building solutions like these.