Title: April 26, 2010 - The Year the Ops War Started

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Hey there,

April 2010. I still remember it like it was yesterday. It’s been almost a decade since then, but that month is stuck in my mind for all the wrong reasons. Back then, we were just starting to grapple with the term “DevOps” and what it really meant. For me, it was about managing servers, writing bash scripts, and trying to get our ops team to see the value of automation.

It felt like every other day, someone new had a shiny new config management tool they wanted us to try. At that time, Chef and Puppet were neck-and-neck in the race for dominance. We were evaluating both, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that we might be missing out on something bigger. I recall spending countless nights trying to figure out how Chef’s ruby DSL worked, only to run into issues with node definitions and resource handling.

On one particular night, my colleague and I spent hours debugging a deployment pipeline that was failing consistently. We had a simple Rails app running on EC2 instances, using Puppet for configuration management. The app was supposed to be stateless, but we kept encountering strange behavior where the environment seemed to have a mind of its own. It turned out our Puppet manifests were inadvertently caching some data between runs, leading to inconsistent states across nodes.

I vividly remember the frustration of trying to pinpoint the issue while dealing with all the other tech news swirling around us. On Hacker News, there was a flurry of discussions about Flash and its future. Apple’s decision to ban Flash on iPhone was toppling everyone’s plans. Meanwhile, Android phones were being ported to iPhones in some clandestine way (or so the rumors suggested). The noisiness of these discussions only made our internal debates louder.

During one team meeting, I argued passionately for a more unified approach—let’s standardize on Puppet and stop wasting time evaluating other tools. The ops lead at the time, who was also my manager, listened but wasn’t convinced. “We’ve always done it this way,” he said, with a mix of skepticism and concern that we might be locking ourselves into something suboptimal.

I remember feeling a bit defeated by all the noise. New tools were being introduced left and right, every month seemed to bring new buzzwords and shiny new solutions. The continuous delivery book was starting to gain traction, but for us, it felt like too much theory without enough practical application.

One thing that kept me going back then was the idea of DevOps—of breaking down walls between developers and operations, of making our infrastructure more reliable and scalable. But implementing this in practice? That was a challenge we were yet to fully embrace.

Looking back, I realize how pivotal those discussions and debates were. They shaped the way we approached ops and automation for years to come. Even though some tools came and went, the principles behind DevOps stuck with us and continue to guide our work today.

So here’s to April 2010—the month when the ops wars started, and the journey of learning, arguing, and evolving began.

Cheers, Brandon