Most teams don't need a "DevOps transformation." They need three things:
I've reviewed Terraform codebases across 4 organisations now. The pattern is always the same: it starts clean, then someone adds "just one more resource," and 6 months later you have a 2,000-line main.tf that nobody wants to touch.
Here's why it happens and how to fix it.
"We can't justify a platform team — our developers can manage their own infrastructure."
I've heard this from three CTOs in the last year. Here's what they didn't realise they were already paying.
"We apply the same engineering practices to our Terraform as we do to our application code."
This sounds responsible. It's also why your infrastructure deployments take 3 weeks to get through code review.
Infrastructure as Code is code, yes. But it's a fundamentally different KIND of code. Treating it identically to application code creates more problems than it solves.
I've helped build or fix CI/CD pipelines at 4 organisations across retail, insurance, and financial services. The technology changes — Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions — but the anti-patterns are always the same.
When leadership says "we need FinOps," what they usually mean is "our cloud bill is too high — make it smaller."
But FinOps isn't about spending less. It's about spending right. Sometimes that means spending MORE — on reserved instances, on better architecture, on tools that prevent waste at scale.
I have 5 cloud certifications. AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Administrator, Terraform Associate, and more. They helped me get interviews. They didn't help me pass them.
Here's the uncomfortable truth I learned after failing a few technical interviews despite having a CV full of cert badges.
GitOps is elegant in theory: Git is the single source of truth, every change is auditable, infrastructure converges to the desired state automatically.
In practice? If your Git hygiene is broken, GitOps just automates the chaos faster.
We spend millions on developer tooling — IDEs, CI/CD, cloud platforms, monitoring. Yet in most organisations, the developer experience is still frustrating.
The gap isn't in the tools. It's in the space BETWEEN the tools.
"We have observability — we use Grafana dashboards."
No. You have monitoring. And there's a critical difference that most teams miss until their first major incident.