In another page, I review the book -"The Phoenix Project". It describes the many good features of Lean, and the "DevOps" movement. This movement has now become a full-fledged industry, where vendors offer to run your whole pipeline for you. I see a lot of commercials explaining why I should use this or that DevOps site. The message is basically: "Running your own tool chain has so many hidden costs that it really cannot compete."

It seems like more and more steps are needed in order to do the perfect release(s). And the argument becomes "leave it to the pro's and focus on what you do best!"

I think back on the "old days" in PC-development, where Borland first, then Microsoft - took all the processes - compiling object files (C and assembly language), linking, locating etc - and put them into creating a single "exe" file on the PC. It was all done in a nice GUI like Visual Studio. As time went by, Microsoft added debugger, intellisense, code-coverage...and what-have-you. At some point in time, the Open Source movement gained traction with 100% configurable, commandline-based tools. We "got out of the Microsoft trap" and became masters in our own house - scripting our builds to run our pipeline. Some enjoyed the new-found freedom, while others longed back to a simpler life.

And now we are moving more and more of the development process to cloud sites, where (other) professionals are maintaining the long tool-chain for us. To get a better overview we have nice UIs with graphs, and simple control via button-clicks.

Is history repeating itself?

Are command-line tools after all an exhausting exercise? Do we need some vendor to aggregate the stuff in nice UIs? Or are we piling up too many steps and thus losing our overview unless we get help?

I do appreciate the benefits of the cloud, the help on the tool-chain etc., - but I also feel that we are becoming less masters in our own houses again. DO we need and understand all these steps - and what happened to the open-source stuff? Is it reduced to free wheels & cogs in corporate machines? Or is it still the important boxes - in-between the corporate UI glue - ensuring that we can move to another vendor if we want to?