Blog

No one really understands what we do. Not my family, not my friends, sometimes not even my coworkers. “DevOps” is this vague, catch-all label people throw around when they don’t want to think about what actually happens after code is written.

Here’s what it really means: I’m the person who worries when you don’t. I’m the one staring at dashboards at midnight when you’re asleep. I’m the one holding the pager when something random and catastrophic happens in production, and no one else can figure out why.

At my startup — which loves calling itself “cloud-native” and “blazing fast” — that means dealing with endless Kubernetes upgrades, broken Helm charts, flaky CI pipelines, and cloud costs spiraling out of control because someone left a test cluster running for three weeks.

I’m tired. Not because I hate the work — I actually love automation. I love the feeling of taking some fragile manual process and turning it into a clean, repeatable pipeline. I love making things resilient. But I’m tired of the hero culture.

Here’s the dirty little secret of DevOps: the better you are at your job, the less visible your work becomes. No one notices when things don’t break. No one writes thank-you notes when uptime is 99.99%. But the one time you miss an alert, or a deploy goes sideways? Everyone notices.

It’s exhausting. And honestly, the constant grind of on-call wears you down. No amount of “unlimited PTO” really compensates for that moment of dread when your phone buzzes at 2:14am and you know you’ll be debugging some weird race condition in a container that shouldn’t even exist.

Some days, I think about quitting. Going back to a pure developer role. Or finding a cushy job with no on-call, where no one expects me to be a silent guardian for their fragile stack. But then I remember: this is the part of tech that feels real. Infrastructure isn’t shiny. It’s messy, human, full of edge cases. You can’t fake it. You either keep the system running — or you don’t.

So for now, I stay. I automate what I can. I mentor junior engineers. I push for sane incident response policies. And when that pager goes off… I answer. Like always.

I’m a DevOps engineer at a mid-sized SaaS startup. You won’t find my name in any headlines or on any conference stage. But if you use our app — and tens of thousands of people do — you’re benefiting from my work every single day, whether you know it or not.

My job? Keeping the wheels turning. Or in modern terms: keeping the cloud from falling out of the sky.

It’s funny. When I tell people what I do, I usually get blank stares. “You work… in development? In operations? What does that even mean?” The truth is, it means both. And neither. DevOps is a weird liminal space. I write code — but I’m not a software engineer. I manage infrastructure — but I’m not an old-school sysadmin. I automate, optimize, monitor, and when all else fails… I’m the one who gets paged at 3am.

Ah yes, the pager. Every DevOps engineer develops a love-hate relationship with the on-call rotation. You dread hearing that vibration in the middle of the night — but also feel a weird thrill when you successfully bring a broken system back from the dead. It’s like being an emergency room doctor for servers.

Our stack? Kubernetes on EKS, running on AWS. Terraform for IaC. GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Datadog and Grafana for observability. Prometheus everywhere. But honestly, the tools are the easy part. The hard part is culture. Teaching developers why you shouldn’t merge on a Friday. Convincing product managers that uptime matters more than one more shiny feature. Fighting the good fight for test coverage and sane rollback plans.

People think DevOps is about tools. It’s not. It’s about trust. Developers trust me to keep the platform stable. I trust them not to ship untested code. The business trusts us both to keep customers happy and revenue flowing. It’s a fragile ecosystem. And when it breaks — when the site goes down, or the database hits a performance cliff — it’s on me to pull it back together.

It’s stressful, sure. But it’s also rewarding. I get to see the entire system, end to end. I get to fix things that no one else can. And at the end of the day, I know my work matters — even if no one outside my team ever sees it.

So next time you click a button and it just works? Spare a thought for your friendly neighborhood DevOps engineer, quietly keeping the lights on behind the scenes.