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10 hours ago
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A couple of months back Microsoft introduced the term “Agentic DevOps” at its Build conference (my full write up about the show is here). I thought it was interesting. I mean obviously, AI is having a profound impact on how we build and manage applications and services. Generative AI is driving the cost of creating software to near zero, and potentially increasing development velocity, and yet… the jury is still out. A lot more software means a lot more technical debt. Writing software is the easy bit – running and maintaining it – that’s where the costs are. And that’s where DevOps comes in. DevOps was intended to break down distinctions between development and operations, with a focus on automating and streamlining the entire software development lifecycle, from dev and test to deployment and operations. The idea reached a peak with the mantra – you build it, you run it. But with agents taking on more tasks, questions of responsibility are blurring. It makes sense that Agentic DevOps would be about using agents to take the automation aspects of DevOps to the next level, but in collaboration it also has obvious implications – because with modern coding practices we’re now increasingly collaborating with machines, raising a whole set of questions about specification, prompting, asynchronous workflows, and so on.
One of the intriguing aspects of generative AI is just how willing software developers seemingly are to jettison the last few decades of engineering best practices. The talk now is of One Shot, Vibe Coding, You Only Live Once (YOLO). It seems to me that Agentic DevOps is more about FAFO than YOLO. We’ve seen amazing horror stories emerge lately about just how cavalier folks are becoming in the gen AI era – oh yeah I’m giving Claude full access to my production database and asking it to change some up some functions in the identity management system. One thing DevOps should never be is cavalier.
But yes – FAFO. This is the age of experimentation. We’ll be spinning things up, seeing how they work, improving them rapidly, and iterating. Incident management is one of the DevOps principles where agents can potentially provide huge benefits. If using agents meaning getting paged less, and not woken up in the middle of the night, that has to be a good thing, right? And folks are indeed using agents in this way. Event-driven agentic systems will be at the heart of Agentic DevOps. Let the agent analyse performance and watch for anomalies. Let the agent suggest a fix. As we gain confidence let the agent make the fix, or simply roll back the change that led to performance degradation.
At this point I want to talk a little bit about AIOps, a now somewhat discredited term. AIOps was a term that came out of the monitoring space, and it meant using machine learning to improve the state of the art in some functions – particularly anomaly detection. While rudimentary automation was expected, AIOps was specifically focused on monitoring and logging. Developers and practitioners didn’t like the term, and the company that coined the term, Gartner, has recently retired it in favour of “Event intelligence”. Some enterprise organisations have literally banned use of the term. So yeah “AIOps” is kind of cooked.
And yet.. It seems to me that Agentic DevOps is really what AIOps always should have been, and perhaps would have been, if we’d had the AI technology available then that we do today. Remember that ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2022, and the rate of innovation across the industry has been frankly bonkers since then. We don’t fully understand the capabilities of new Frontier models as they are rolled out, but they are really really good at some of the things that we’ve needed for effective DevOps. Creating documentation of code and practices, creating runbooks, generating scripts, monitoring… monitoring systems for changes, writing plans, writing tests. Collaborating with operators, developer and users in natural languages. More detailed bug reporting (no more need to try and understand what’s happening in that screenshot, upload it and the system understands already), reading and parsing logs. Centralising and summarising information. And obviously agents don’t need to sleep, which is kind of handy in DevOps scenarios.
One of the areas I am particularly interested in given my work in Progressive Delivery is how generative AI impacts what AIOps was in the 2016-2024 sense – which is to say, AI used in Observability use cases. The days of trying to parse logs by hand – maybe they are indeed behind us. Generative AI is going to fundamentally remake monitoring, logging and tracing. Observability plus AI is a whole new frontier. Imagine not needing to learn a new query language in order to interact with system data.
Anyway – at Build I was lucky enough to spend some time with Gene Kim and Doctor Nicole Forsgren talking about these issues. Gene literally wrote the book on DevOps and is currently writing a book about Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge, which is sure to be essential reading – both of them are really good at writing prose that draws you in, to explain complex subjects. Kim is now a Vibe Coding maximalist – he believes the days of hand-written code are behind us.
Forsgren has made a huge impact on the the industry through her work as one creator of the widely adopted DORA and SPACE frameworks, and co-author of the Accelerate and the DevOps Handbook, alongside Kim. Naturally she is also working on a new book – about Developer Experience. She’s a little more pragmatic about people writing code.
Anyway – I can’t think of two smarter and more appropriate people to be in conversation about the future of DevOps in the agentic era.
I will end this post with a couple of quotes. First Gene Kim:
Agentic DevOps is a significant part of the way we all code now. Because no one should have to type in code by hand anymore. And the person who actually coined that was Dr. Eric Meijer. So famous in this community for his work on Visual Basic, C Sharp. He went on to develop the Hack language at Facebook Meta. And he said, yeah, we are probably the last generation of developers who will write code by hand.
And I just thought that just so spoke to me. And, yeah, so agentic is when you can actually show the LLM agent the output of his work and it can fix it for you.
And, you know, from my perspective, I mean, it’s just utterly transformative. I have an experience where I spent 45 minutes being bossed around by an LLM telling me to type this, type that. And, you know, the aha moment was asking it to run curl by itself. Right? And 45 seconds later, it fixed the issue with the Trello API that I was struggling with in 45 seconds. The same thing with Google Docs. I mean, so it’s just like once you see something like that happening it just becomes so obvious, you know, that there are some things that you just shouldn’t be in the loop. Because the only thing you are now is the bottleneck, copying and pasting from one window to another. So, and it’s not just for developers, it’s for everybody. Technologists, for operations, infrastructure, DevOps, all of that. So, I don’t think we want to say that the only people who benefit from this are just developers because as someone famous said, who broke my build is going to be said even more often.”
And Nicole Forsgren:
We’ve really spent a lot of time focusing on writing code and how AI and LLMs and agents, agents can kind of help us bootstrap and amplify and accelerate that, and I think there’s also a ton of opportunity, not just in the inner loop, but all the way through the outer loop. Absolutely. What do we think about the opportunity for AI? Especially now we have agents to improve local test and build, to improve our pull request and code review process, to improve build and integration, to improve things like release. So, for me, I think that’s, when I think about agentic DevOps, that’s kind of what it is. The foundational principles are still really important, especially now that the speed and volume of creation has sped up so much. Now the rest of that software development loop is even more important.
You can find the whole transcript of the interview here, and the video is embedded below.
Microsoft is a client, and sponsored the video.
