People think DevOps is full of drills and heroic moments. High-stakes outages, pager alerts at 3 am, dramatic fixes that save the company from a big disaster. And yeah, those moments happen. But most of the job? It’s a painful routine.
Most days, I’m not doing something very heroic. I watch pipelines run, and I review the infrastructure PRs. I update helm charts, tweak alert thresholds, clean up old resources, and double-check if someone remembered to tag the new EC instances. I have to sit in a meeting and discuss cost optimization. I work on patching things, automating them, and then patching up the automations. It’s all a vast process, not at all glamorous. But here’s the twist: I love it. There is something deeply satisfying about the predictability. When the system hums, when alerts stay green, when deploys go out without incident, it’s not dull, it’s a huge success. It’s hard-won stability, and I take pride in it.
It’s like maintaining a complex machine. You oil it, clean it, tighten a few screws. Most days, nothing happens. But you know that if you stop doing those mundane things, the whole thing will fall apart, just not right away. That’s what keeps you alert.
And when the unexpected does happen, a spike in 500 errors, a cloud service glitch, a DNS misfire at 2 am, you spring into action. That’s when the adrenaline hits. Suddenly, the muscle memory kicks in. You’re checking logs, running queries, rolling back, and rerouting traffic. It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos, and weirdly enough, you’re built for it. That contrast is what makes DevOps exciting. The quiet, steady rhythm is punctuated by bursts of crisis and the quiet satisfaction afterward when everything’s back to normal. No one writes home about a Kubernetes node draining successfully. But I do in my head.
And then there’s the longer arc, the satisfaction of seeing a system improve over time. Watching a flaky CI pipeline become rock solid. Watching on-call alerts go from dozens a week to almost none. Watching the team trust the infrastructure more and more.
So yeah, my job is mundane. Repetitive. Filled with invisible, thankless tasks. But to me, every clean deploy, every green dashboard, every incident not happening, that’s the win. That’s the work.
And that’s exciting enough.