In this article, Rene van Osnabrugge shares insights from his LEAD podcast and discusses whether DevOps is truly dead or simply evolving, highlighting the impact of platform engineering on modern engineering culture.

Is DevOps Dead? Or Just Evolving?

By Rene van Osnabrugge

In 2024, I created the LEAD podcast with my good friend Geert van der Cruijsen. Through this podcast, we explored different facets of building a strong engineering culture—sometimes with guests, sometimes not. Here, I want to share some stories and personal insights drawn from those episodes. Full credit is due not only to myself, but also to Geert, our guests, and Xebia for supporting this journey.

“DevOps Is Dead. Long Live Platform Engineering”?

When I first heard the phrase “DevOps is dead. Long live platform engineering,” I was taken aback. Over the past year, this sentiment popped up at conferences, in blogs, and in vendor pitches. I’ve long been an advocate of DevOps—the principles make sense, and the results speak for themselves. So the suggestion that DevOps had run its course sounded premature.

But after many thoughtful conversations with Geert, my conclusion is less dramatic: DevOps isn’t dead—it’s evolving. And that evolution may actually be a positive development.

The Problem: DevOps Has Become Overwhelming

The original goal of DevOps was simple: break down silos between development and operations, and empower teams with ownership over what they build—from idea to production. This vision still holds value. Teams that own their code make better decisions, improve reliability, and feel more invested in outcomes.

However, as the demands on modern development teams have grown—cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, security, compliance, cost tracking, networking, provisioning—the cognitive load has become significant. Even highly skilled teams can’t excel at everything. The cracks began to show: development teams struggled to provision environments, became bogged down in tasks outside their core focus, and wound up managing platforms they never wanted to own.

These challenges didn’t signal the failure of DevOps, but rather the inevitable collision of vision with reality. To complicate matters, the DevOps label became overused, attached to nearly every tool and process, diluting its original intent.

Platform Engineering: Enabling DevOps

Enter platform engineering—not as a replacement for DevOps, but as a critical enabler.

The premise of platform engineering is to reduce cognitive load for development teams, helping them stay focused on delivering business value. Internal platform teams build reusable products—templates, services, and tools—that other teams leverage to move faster and with greater consistency.

For example, instead of every team configuring its own infrastructure for an API, the platform team provides a standard, self-service approach. Instead of handling firewall changes through support tickets, a platform team implements self-service interfaces, reducing days of waiting to minutes.

Importantly, these platforms are optional. Teams can choose to use, customize, or disregard the provided solutions, within organizational boundaries for security and compliance. The underlying philosophy is to offer support while preserving team autonomy—not enforcing top-down control.

Attributes of a Good Platform Team

A recurrent theme from our podcast is that strong platform teams act like product teams. Their customers are internal developers and engineers. Success comes from listening to users, understanding where time and productivity are lost, and then delivering targeted solutions.

All too often, platform teams emerge from rebranded operations teams, retaining old habits: tickets, tight control, and long lead times. That’s just a new bottleneck in disguise.

Instead, effective internal platforms should feel like any other quality cloud service—easy to use, well-documented, and valuable to developers. If adoption is low, that signals a problem. Support for internal open source models can keep platforms relevant and flexible, with teams able to contribute enhancements as needed.

Start with Problems, Not Tools

If you are considering building a platform team, begin with your developers. Discover which tasks are repetitive, which processes slow teams down, and what blocks fast delivery.

Address these pain points one by one. Perhaps start with environment provisioning, or streamlining approvals for security changes, or automating pipeline setup. Focus on incremental improvements, use the tools you already have (Git, simple pipelines, YAML files), and only invest in larger solutions when justified by actual needs.

Conclusion: DevOps Isn’t Dead

DevOps still represents the goal: team ownership, fast feedback, and end-to-end responsibility. But it’s clear that simply telling teams “you build it, you run it” is no longer sufficient.

Platform engineering provides the tools, standards, and guardrails that allow teams to thrive within the DevOps mindset. The two approaches are not in conflict; they’re complementary. DevOps sets the mindset, while platform engineering provides practical support for execution.

DevOps isn’t dead—it’s maturing. Like any discipline, it requires ongoing attention and evolution.

Listen to the Original Episode

To hear the full discussion from which these insights are drawn, check out the original LEAD podcast episode.

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