MEDIAPEDIA

Gatekeeping in the Cloud: How DevOps Turned Simplicity Into Snobbery

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Simplicity Wasn’t Broken, But We “Fixed” It Anyway

Not too long ago, deploying a web app could be done by a small team — or even a single developer — with some shared hosting, a UI-based control panel, and FTP access. You clicked buttons, set file permissions, uploaded a ZIP, and boom — your app was live. It wasn’t perfect, but it was accessible, understandable, and it worked.

Then came Docker.

Then came Kubernetes.

Then came the Cloud CLI renaissance — disguised as progress but bloated with a kind of elitist complexity. What was once a domain welcoming to generalists became a jargon-filled rabbit hole. Words like sidecar, init container, service mesh, IAM roles, pod affinity, and ingress controller became badges of honor — or walls to keep the “non-technical” out.

It wasn’t about better software. It was about showing off.

This shift didn’t make IT better. It made IT smug.

The Accessibility Era

Let’s go back to the days of Windows Server with IIS, or early Apache on Linux. Sure, it had quirks. But your average developer could get a website running, set up a cron job, and monitor logs using visual tools or basic terminal commands. IT was approachable. You didn’t need a CS degree, a Udemy Kubernetes course, and 40 Stack Overflow tabs open to deploy a contact form.

Today? Good luck doing anything without learning YAML and spending 2 hours configuring a Kubernetes deployment just to serve a static site.

Docker, the Trojan Horse

Docker arrived as a “simple” solution. Developers were promised isolated environments, fast builds, and easy-to-share runtimes. The reality? Containers solved some problems and introduced a mountain of new ones:

  • Container sprawl
  • Image bloat and supply chain issues
  • Complex orchestration just to reboot a service

What was meant to help became a new form of ceremony — you can’t just run code. You need to containerize it, write a Dockerfile, debug weird layering issues, push to a registry, manage secrets, set up networking, and THEN you might be able to test it.

Suddenly, your app isn’t the problem. Your infrastructure literacy is.

Kubernetes — The Overengineered Catastrophe

Ask anyone who’s set up a bare Kubernetes cluster if it was “simple.” Kubernetes was sold as a self-healing, cloud-native orchestration solution. But instead, it became a religion with thousands of commandments. “Thou shalt define thy pod readiness probe.” “Thou shalt deploy only via Helm.”

Most engineers don’t understand the full Kubernetes stack — and they’re not supposed to. It’s not built for humans anymore. It’s built for itself. If you can’t debug why a container crashes and restarts in a loop due to a subtle RBAC misconfiguration, are you even a real engineer?

This is the toxic mindset modern IT promotes. You’re not rewarded for building useful things. You’re rewarded for navigating labyrinthine platforms.

Part I: The Simplicity That Once Was

When UIs Empowered, Not Abstracted

There was a time when the “IT guy” could be anyone — a scrappy developer, a curious teenager, a college student with a dream and a GoDaddy shared hosting plan. GUIs weren’t looked down upon — they were tools of empowerment.

Think of:

  • cPanel: Upload your PHP files, configure databases with a few clicks, and launch WordPress in under 5 minutes.
  • Visual Studio: Write code, debug, compile, deploy — all in one place.
  • FileZilla and FTP tools: Drag-and-drop deployment.

These tools had flaws, yes. But they also had a clear mental model: You understood what was happening. You weren’t abstracted away behind layers of “magic glue” and configuration as code. The interface guided you. It taught you.

Today’s tools? They obscure.

The Fallacy of Abstraction

Modern cloud-native tooling hides complexity, but it doesn’t remove it. Worse — it exposes you to failure states without giving you the tools to understand them.

For example:

  • Deploy an app to Kubernetes. It fails. Why? Could be:
    • Bad Docker image
    • Bad YAML
    • Misconfigured readiness probe
    • No persistent volume
    • Resource quota exceeded
    • Pod placement conflicts
    • Service missing or misrouted
    • RBAC denies permission

The error message?
CrashLoopBackOff

That’s it.

Instead of aiding understanding, this ecosystem uses “abstraction” as a bludgeon. It assumes the developer knows enough to trace through five different layers of architecture to find the root cause.

When IT Was a Tool, Not an Identity

Back then, you were a developer building something. The platform was your helper — not your primary job.

Now, being “good at Kubernetes” or “certified in AWS” is the identity. You’re not a builder anymore. You’re a platform whisperer. And ironically, most of these people build nothing of lasting value. They deploy hello-world apps and set up monitoring dashboards for services that don’t even serve real traffic — and get paid 2x what actual product engineers make.

This is where the superiority complex began: mastery of arcane tools became more valued than building real things. Knowing the “trick” to fix a Terraform state bug made you the guru. Solving a customer’s pain point? Secondary.

The SRE Cargo Cult

Then came Site Reliability Engineering — a Google-inspired discipline meant to bridge ops and dev with empathy and tooling. But like most things, it got… bastardized.

Instead of solving reliability issues through human-focused, systemic thinking, SREs became YAML janitors. Their days are filled with:

  • Tuning resource limits to fix autoscaling
  • Decrypting vague Prometheus metrics
  • Staring at Grafana dashboards hoping for insights

Meanwhile, simple downtime issues like “disk got full” or “queue is jammed” go unsolved for hours — because no one owns the simple stuff anymore.

The obsession with automation and “everything as code” made even the smallest incidents require a pull request, a CI/CD pipeline run, and an approval process. Remember when someone could just restart the service?

Skill Inflation and the Gatekeeping Renaissance

Today, job listings ask for:

“3+ years of Kubernetes, 5+ years AWS, experience with Helm, Terraform, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, Istio, GitOps, SOPS, Kustomize…”

Just to deploy a CRUD app.

This isn’t real progress. It’s skill inflation. The bar keeps getting higher not because the work got harder — but because we keep inventing unnecessarily complex tools to gatekeep who can participate.

Try telling a junior dev to deploy their personal blog to the cloud using modern “best practices.” Watch the light die in their eyes by step three of writing a Dockerfile and debugging broken YAML with no logs.

  • We traded accessibility for status.
  • Simplicity is no longer seen as elegance, but as incompetence.
  • GUIs that once enabled people are now mocked.
  • The joy of making things has been replaced with the drudgery of managing systems that were designed to impress, not to serve.

Part II: The Rise of DevOps and the CLI Revival

DevOps — The Ideology That Ate Itself

DevOps started with a noble mission: break down walls between development and operations. Share responsibility. Automate the boring stuff. Deploy faster. Learn faster. Recover faster.

What happened?

It became a buzzword.
Then a job title.
Then a religion.

Now we have DevOps engineers whose entire job is writing shell scripts, debugging CI/CD YAMLs, and building internal tooling so over-complicated it needs its own DevOps team to maintain.

You’re not breaking silos. You’re just building a newer, shinier one — with better error messages… if you’re lucky.

Docker — The Gateway Drug to Madness

Docker was marketed as freedom:

“Ship your app with all its dependencies in one portable container. No more ‘it works on my machine.’”

Sounds great, right?

Now fast forward:

  • A simple app requires:
    • A Dockerfile
    • .dockerignore
    • Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests
    • Entrypoint scripts
    • Volume mount strategies
    • Registry setup and image tagging
    • Version pinning and vulnerability scanning

All this to serve a static page. What the hell happened?

Docker solved a real problem — and then poisoned the well by making that solution mandatory for even the most basic scenarios. It gave birth to the cargo cult of containers, where if you’re not running in Docker, you’re “doing it wrong.”

Suddenly, local development isn’t npm start. It’s docker-compose up --build… after you fight through permission errors and network bridge hell.

Cloud CLI Hell — One Syntax to Bind Them All (But Not Really)

Remember when you could deploy a website by dragging files into an FTP folder?

Now let’s deploy a website to AWS:

shCopyEditaws s3 sync ./site s3://mybucket --acl public-read
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id ABC123 --paths "/*"

Sounds simple. Until:

  • Your CLI is out of date
  • You forgot to aws configure
  • You’re in the wrong region
  • Your IAM role lacks permission
  • You hit a service quota
  • Or the CLI decides to return a MalformedPolicyDocument error with no explanation

The cloud providers have built dozens of CLIs for every microservice they’ve vomited out — each with slightly different syntax, error messaging, and documentation rot.

And God help you if you’re on Azure. Their CLI is a test of patience, punishment, and your will to live.

YAML — The Worst Programming Language That Isn’t One

No rant about modern IT is complete without the most infuriating invention of the last decade:

YAML

It pretends to be human-readable. But behind those innocent indents lie:

  • Invisible spaces vs tabs errors
  • Silent parsing failures
  • Multiline strings that act differently if you use |, >, or >-
  • Boolean values that randomly parse as strings (yes: true, on: false)

And because every platform interprets YAML differently, writing a Helm chart or a GitHub Actions workflow is like playing Russian Roulette with whitespace.

YAML is now the lingua franca of complexity — used in Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD tools, monitoring configs, serverless functions, and more.

Every tool wants to be “configurable,” but none of them wants to own the UX. So you get dumped into YAML, told “just write what you need,” and when it breaks, you’re on your own in a sea of stack traces and cryptic docs.

GitOps — Now Even Deployment Has Git Anxiety

Enter GitOps:

“Just push your changes to Git and it will auto-deploy!”

Here’s what really happens:

  1. You push a change
  2. Your deployment fails
  3. You need to roll back… but you can’t, because the system is “declarative”
  4. Now you’re debugging not the app, but the state of Git itself vs the cluster
  5. Your rollback accidentally triggers another pipeline which nukes a config file
  6. Congratulations. Your system is now too automated to be usable

GitOps turned a simple act — deploying code — into a Rube Goldberg machine with commit messages as API calls and merge conflicts as deployment blockers.

We took “push to prod” and somehow made it less predictable than just SSH-ing into a server and running a bash script.

CI/CD — Continuous Irritation / Constant Debugging

CI/CD tools were meant to automate the boring stuff. Instead, they became their own full-time jobs.

Each tool has its own:

  • YAML schema
  • Plugin ecosystem
  • Syntax quirks
  • Secret management

Here’s a real-world CI pipeline:

yamlCopyEditsteps:
  - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
  - run: npm install
  - run: npm run build
  - uses: some-obscure-action-with-bad-docs
  - if: github.event.pull_request.head.repo.fork == true
    run: echo "Maybe deploy? Who knows?"

You pray it works. It fails. You stare at logs that are 500 lines of ::group:: markers. You tweak the if condition, push again, and wait 10 minutes to see if it breaks differently.

CI/CD has turned into trial-and-error-as-a-service.

  • DevOps started with good intentions but devolved into complexity worship.
  • Docker became a mandatory puzzle box.
  • Cloud CLIs made simple tasks soul-draining.
  • YAML is a landmine field disguised as simplicity.
  • GitOps introduced chaos under the guise of purity.
  • CI/CD tools promise automation, but often deliver headache.

Part III: The Egoification of Engineering

The Rise of the Techno-Elite

Once upon a time, engineers were builders. They solved problems. They were humble craftspeople who took pride in getting things to work — not in sounding smart.

Now?

We’ve bred a generation of platform aristocrats. The measure of skill isn’t what you built — it’s how many tools you can name-drop while doing it.

  • “Oh, you’re using Terraform? That’s cute. We’ve moved to Pulumi with custom Go providers.”
  • “You still deploy monoliths? Haven’t you read about service meshes and ephemeral functions?”
  • “You don’t use ArgoCD with sealed secrets and Kustomize overlays?”

No one knows what these things do. But they’ll judge you for not using them.

Engineering has been hijacked by people more interested in looking intelligent than being effective. And worst of all — we reward it. LinkedIn claps. DevRel blogs it. HR writes job descriptions based on it.

It’s performance over purpose. Optics over outcome.

Tool Tribalism — Choose Your God

Modern IT has become a never-ending Pokémon battle of tools:

  • Terraform vs Pulumi
  • Docker Compose vs Kubernetes
  • Jenkins vs GitHub Actions vs GitLab CI vs CircleCI
  • Helm vs Kustomize
  • AWS vs GCP vs Azure
  • Bash vs Python vs Groovy vs YAML vs DSLs built by sadists

And instead of choosing based on use case, teams choose based on identity. The tool you use defines your tribe. Your stack isn’t a means to an end — it’s a flag you wave in a Twitter war.

We used to ask, “What’s the best way to solve this?”

Now it’s, “What stack do we have to use to look competent in front of VCs or management?”

Tools are no longer neutral. They’re status symbols.

The Myth of the 10x Engineer

Ah, the mythical 10x engineer — the solo rockstar who types faster than you can think, understands every obscure log message, and hates meetings and teammates.

In reality? They’re:

  • The person who set up your cluster in a way no one else understands
  • The one who wrote 2000 lines of Bash to “automate” a deployment that now fails silently
  • The one who refuses to write docs because “you should just read the code”

This isn’t brilliance. It’s hostage-taking.
They aren’t making your system better — they’re ensuring no one else can touch it.

And management rewards them for it.

The cult of the 10x engineer worships individual chaos masked as genius. And because no one wants to look stupid, the team tiptoes around their mess like it’s sacred ground.

Conferences, Consultants, and Kool-Aid

Conferences used to be about learning. Now they’re TED Talks for tools.

A typical talk:

“How we scaled to 10 million users with microservices, Kubernetes, GraphQL federation, service meshes, and zero-downtime blue-green-canary rollbacks on demand.”

What they don’t say:

  • Their app is a glorified to-do list
  • 9.9 million of those “users” signed up once and never came back
  • Half the system is on fire but looks cool on Grafana dashboards
  • It takes 4 people to explain the deployment process

Meanwhile, every new tool launch is accompanied by a Medium post, a launch video, and a Slack community with “ambassadors” who hype it up before it even works properly.

We’re marketing complexity as progress.
And paying consultants to explain the mess we created by following the last consultant.

When Simplicity Becomes a Liability

Today, if you propose something simple, you’re seen as:

  • “Not forward-thinking”
  • “Not cloud-native”
  • “Too junior to understand the bigger picture”

You say: “Let’s use a monolith. It’s faster to ship.”
They say: “No, we need services. Scalability. Event-driven architecture.”
You say: “Let’s just use S3 for storage.”
They say: “No, we need a custom storage interface that can switch backends on the fly.”

Simplicity is viewed as amateur. Complexity is seen as maturity.

But here’s the truth: the most experienced engineers favor the simplest tools that get the job done.
It’s the insecure ones who hide behind buzzwords.

The Platform Aristocracy

Once you set up a platform team, it should help others ship faster.

But many platform teams:

  • Gatekeep knowledge
  • Invent unnecessary abstractions
  • Build platforms on top of platforms that require internal training
  • Blame developers for “not using the platform correctly”

Instead of reducing friction, they add new tax layers.
Want to deploy a Node.js app?

You’ll need:

  • An onboarding session
  • A ticket for a namespace
  • A code freeze approval
  • A review of your Helm chart
  • A secret rotation meeting
  • A post-deployment SLO calibration

You are now a guest in the kingdom of the platform team.
And they’re too busy rewriting the platform to help you.

  • The culture of engineering has shifted from problem-solving to flexing.
  • Tooling is no longer practical — it’s tribal.
  • Simplicity is mocked, complexity is celebrated.
  • Knowledge is hoarded, not shared.
  • The people who make things harder are often seen as the most valuable.

Part IV: Death to Generalism

Full-Stack? Fully Screwed

There was a time when being a “full-stack developer” meant something beautiful.

You could:

  • Build a UI in HTML/CSS/JS
  • Set up a backend in PHP, Python, or Java
  • Run it on a VPS or shared host
  • Use MySQL or PostgreSQL
  • Deploy with SCP, FTP, or even just git push

It was empowering. You were a one-person army. You didn’t need a DevOps engineer, a platform team, a cloud architect, and a Kubernetes shaman to get things into production.

Today? Try building and deploying a web app solo on modern infrastructure.

Good luck.

You’ll face:

  • Docker and containerization
  • Kubernetes manifests
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Secrets management
  • Monitoring setup
  • Resource quotas
  • Ingress and DNS
  • TLS certificates
  • Cloud cost management

Suddenly, your app isn’t the problem. The platform is.

The End of the Curious Tinkerer

In the early days of the web, you could learn by doing.

Curious about how websites worked?
View source. Edit HTML. Save. Refresh. Done.

Curious how a server runs?
Spin up a DigitalOcean droplet. SSH in. Play around.

Now?

You’re met with:

  • Obscure setup steps
  • Docker dependencies
  • Unreadable CI logs
  • 403 errors with no explanation
  • Permission-denied hellscapes

The barrier to entry is no longer technical skill — it’s platform literacy.

And that literacy is locked behind:

  • Certifications
  • Tribal language
  • Insider jargon
  • Gatekeeping communities

We’ve effectively told curious newcomers:

“Go away. Unless you already know everything, this is not for you.”

Certification Over Competence

Want to prove you’re good at cloud?

You can build something awesome and show it off.

Or…

You can take a $300 exam, memorize service limits, and get a badge that says:
✅ AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

We now measure understanding by test-taking ability.

Certifications aren’t proof of real-world skill. They’re pay-to-play access keys to jobs and credibility in a world so complex that hiring managers no longer trust portfolios — they trust badges.

It’s not about what you can do.
It’s about what cert you can wave in front of a recruiter to say:

“I know the secret names of AWS services.”

The Specialization Trap

In old-school IT, you could be a generalist and still be valuable.

Now? If you don’t specialize, you’re seen as a liability.

  • Frontend? Better know React, Tailwind, TypeScript, Webpack, GraphQL, and Next.js.
  • Backend? Hope you understand microservices, gRPC, distributed tracing, and message brokers.
  • Infrastructure? Be ready for Terraform, Vault, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, Istio, ArgoCD, and SRE rituals.

You’re not allowed to be good at “many things.”
You must be an expert at some tiny niche no one outside of your company even understands.

And if that niche becomes obsolete?
Congratulations. You’re now technically unemployable.

Tech Now Punishes the Curious

Tech was once the great equalizer.

Didn’t go to college? No problem.
Just build. Just ship. Just learn.

Now?

  • Want to deploy a simple backend? Better read 80 pages of Kubernetes documentation.
  • Want to build a website? Hope you enjoy configuring Webpack and dealing with node_modules.
  • Want to monitor your app? Set up Prometheus exporters, scrape configs, and build Grafana dashboards with PromQL — just to know if your app is alive.

You can’t just learn anymore.

You need to study systems built by people who didn’t care if anyone understood them.
And worse — you’ll be blamed when they break.

Who Has Time to Keep Up?

With a new framework or tool launched every week, you’re either:

  • On the bleeding edge and exhausted
  • Or outdated and irrelevant

You’re expected to:

  • Know the latest CI tools
  • Keep up with breaking changes in your cloud provider
  • Relearn infrastructure every 18 months
  • Write blog posts
  • Give talks
  • Contribute to open source
  • Learn AI/ML/LLMs now, too — or else

The industry doesn’t reward consistency or reliability anymore. It rewards constant reinvention, at the cost of mental health and technical stability.

If you stop swimming — you drown.

  • The generalist is dead — or worse, unemployed.
  • Certifications replaced trust in actual skills.
  • Curiosity is punished by complexity.
  • Tech used to empower the individual — now it buries them in tooling.
  • The only ones succeeding are those with time, money, or institutional backing.

Part V: Real People, Real Problems

“I Just Wanted to Deploy My App” — A Developer’s Horror Story

Meet Anita — a solo developer working on a small passion project: a simple journal app for teens struggling with anxiety.

She builds it in React and Node.
The code works beautifully.

Now she wants to deploy it.

What follows is a month-long descent into hell:

  • First, she tries Netlify. But it doesn’t support her backend.
  • Then she tries Vercel. But they want everything to be serverless.
  • Then AWS — and the nightmare begins.

“I spent 4 days just figuring out how to deploy a container. I didn’t even know I had to containerize anything. It kept saying I needed an ECS Task Definition. I had to set up a VPC. Then I had to make a subnet. Then security groups. Then an IAM role. And when I finally deployed it, I got a blank page with no logs.”

She gave up.
The app never launched.
The kids never saw it.

All because modern tech buried creativity under configuration.

Burnout, the Cloud-Native Disease

There’s a special kind of burnout that happens when you aren’t failing — you’re just drowning in avoidable, unnecessary complexity.

You write 50 lines of business logic.
Then 500 lines of infrastructure code just to run it.

You get paged at 3AM — not because your code broke, but because:

  • A sidecar proxy got updated
  • Your container registry credentials expired
  • Your metrics pipeline silently stopped exporting

Engineers aren’t quitting tech because it’s hard.
They’re quitting because it’s soul-crushingly stupid.

They’re tired of:

  • Debugging tools they didn’t choose
  • Fighting YAML formatting errors at midnight
  • Being told they “lack platform context” when things fail

This isn’t tech.
This is bureaucracy in code form.

The Cult of “Move Fast and Automate Everything”

Automation was supposed to free us.

Now it’s just another reason we don’t know how anything works.

Real example:

An SRE team sets up auto-scaling rules. It spins up pods aggressively on CPU spikes. One day, a minor app bug causes an infinite loop. The cluster spins up 200 pods. Cloud costs skyrocket. Alerts fire. PagerDuty explodes.

No one on the team knows how the auto-scaling policy works.
The person who set it up left six months ago.

The fix?
Disable auto-scaling.

The lesson?
Sometimes, manual and boring is better than automated and disastrous.

Death by Invisible Toil

There’s a kind of work in modern IT that no one talks about:

  • Digging through broken pipelines
  • Debugging flaky test environments
  • Re-running failed CI builds
  • Updating secrets because of policy changes
  • Waiting for approval from some internal ticketing system
  • Watching the 10th deployment today fail because the config changed in some repo you’ve never seen before

This work doesn’t show up in metrics.
It isn’t in your OKRs.
But it eats your entire day.

You’re not coding.
You’re chipping away at a giant wall of invisible bullshit just to do your actual job.

This is toil.
And it’s killing creativity.

When Leaving Tech Feels Like Escaping a Cult

Some people “make it” in tech:

  • Six-figure jobs
  • Full remote
  • Fancy titles
  • Cloud certifications
  • Stock options

And yet… they quit.

They go into:

  • Farming
  • Art
  • Teaching
  • Repair work
  • Local politics
  • Anything where they can see the result of their labor without opening a Grafana dashboard

They leave because:

  • They’re tired of being “always learning” tools they don’t care about.
  • They want their skills to matter more than their platform fluency.
  • They want meaning — not mental gymnastics.

These are not failures.
They’re survivors.

They chose sanity over complexity theater.

  • Real developers are crushed by tooling, not coding.
  • The cost of complexity is real — burnout, failure, and lost potential.
  • Automation, when misused, breaks more than it fixes.
  • Invisible toil is eroding joy and productivity.
  • People are walking away from “successful” tech careers just to feel human again.

Part VI: Who Benefits?

Complexity is a Business Model

In a sane world, tools would get simpler over time.
In our world? They become increasingly convoluted.

Why?

Because complex tools make money.

  • They generate demand for consultants.
  • They require training, certifications, and books.
  • They lock companies into vendor ecosystems.
  • They create support contracts, SaaS dashboards, and cloud cost calculators.

When a tool is “simple,” you use it once and move on.
When it’s needlessly complex, it becomes an industry.

The Certification Industrial Complex

Certifications are no longer about learning — they’re about credential inflation.

Want a job in cloud? Better have:

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Professional)
  • Azure Fundamentals
  • Google Cloud Digital Leader
  • Terraform Associate
  • Kubernetes CKA, CKAD, CKS

Each exam:

  • Costs money
  • Requires study guides (also paid)
  • Offers bootcamps (also paid)
  • Expires in 2–3 years

This is planned obsolescence of knowledge.

It’s a treadmill that:

  1. Forces you to keep up with platforms that shouldn’t change this fast
  2. Monetizes your stress and fear of irrelevance
  3. Offers badges instead of competence

You’re not improving — you’re renewing.

Consultants Solving Problems They Created

Consultants swoop in like saviors.

“We’ll help you migrate to Kubernetes!”

Then 9 months later:

“We’ll help you fix the problems you didn’t have before we migrated you to Kubernetes.”

A classic move:

  1. Convince your leadership that your architecture is outdated
  2. Sell a new stack (containerize everything, go microservices)
  3. Charge for implementation
  4. Charge for optimization
  5. Sell support retainers for “production issues”

Congratulations. You’ve just been chaos-looped.

They’re not solving problems.
They’re extracting value from confusion.

And the more complex the stack, the more you’ll need them.

DevRel, Tooling, and the Influencer Era

Once, dev advocacy meant writing helpful docs and explaining tools.

Now?

It’s:

  • Livestreams of deploying “To-Do App 9000” on 12 tools no one uses
  • Blog posts that glorify tools over outcomes
  • Conference talks where the tool is the star, not the user

They don’t show:

  • The pain of maintaining the stack for 6 months
  • The edge cases
  • The broken documentation
  • The churn, the tradeoffs, the human cost

Instead, it’s:

“Look how easy it is to build a real-time e-commerce system using 8 cloud services and a queue-based event-driven architecture for a static site!”

What you get is content marketing dressed as education.

And every dev that watches it feels like they’re falling behind — unless they, too, embrace this pile of pointless abstraction.

Careerism in the Age of Self-Inflicted Wounds

Some engineers get promoted for solving problems they created.

You know the type:

  • They push for a complicated new platform
  • Set it up poorly
  • Things break
  • They write 20 pages of docs to explain the monster
  • They become the only one who can fix it
  • Now they’re “critical to the team”

This is the careerism of chaos — where complexity is not a bug, but a ladder.

Meanwhile:

  • The developer who wrote clean, stable, boring code gets ignored.
  • The junior dev who keeps asking “why is this so complicated?” gets dismissed.
  • The team that builds simple, reliable software is told they lack “innovation.”

Because when complexity becomes a currency, clarity is cheapened.

Vendor Lock-In is a Feature, Not a Flaw

Cloud providers and tooling companies say:

“You can move anytime — we’re open!”

But in practice?

  • You build scripts for AWS CLI
  • Use S3-specific lifecycle rules
  • Bind to IAM permissions
  • Adopt Lambda with CloudWatch triggers
  • Use their metrics, their logs, their APIs

And now you’re stuck.

Switching means:

  • Rewriting everything
  • Relearning a new CLI
  • Migrating terabytes of data
  • Reconfiguring secrets, roles, CI pipelines, monitoring

No one wants to do it. So they pay the bill.
Even when it hurts.

Lock-in isn’t an accident.
It’s the strategy.

And complexity?
It’s the camouflage that hides it.

  • The complexity explosion benefits tool vendors, consultants, cloud providers, and certification mills.
  • Certification has become a form of gatekeeping, not empowerment.
  • Consultants and influencers thrive in confusion.
  • Engineers now build Rube Goldberg systems — not to solve problems, but to create job security.
  • Everyone tells you these tools are “freedom” — but they lock you in deeper with every YAML file.

Part VII: A Better Way Forward

Burning the trash heap of tech complexity, and building something human again.

Simplicity is Not Naivety

We’ve been gaslit by the complexity merchants.

They tell you:

  • “Simple tools are for hobbyists.”
  • “Real engineers write YAML.”
  • “If you can’t manage your own Kubernetes cluster, maybe you’re not cut out for this industry.”

Nonsense.

Simplicity is not childish.
It’s not a lack of ability.
It’s a deliberate act of resistance.

Building simple systems takes maturity, clarity of thought, and courage — because in today’s ecosystem, you are constantly nudged toward abstraction hell.

So the first step to reclaiming sanity is to declare:

I don’t care if it’s “industry standard” — if it adds no value, it’s gone.

Tools That Serve, Not Preach

A good tool doesn’t demand loyalty.
It doesn’t need a dashboard, a certification, a conference talk, or a brand ambassador.

A good tool:

  • Solves one problem well.
  • Has sane defaults.
  • Is documented like a human wrote it.
  • Doesn’t pretend your “hello world” is a banking app.

Remember tools like:

  • rsync
  • cron
  • systemd (for all its quirks, still more transparent than most “orchestrators”)
  • PostgreSQL — a database that gets the job done without marketing buzzwords

You don’t need a “developer portal” or “platform engineering” to deploy a Python script.

Sometimes, a script + cron job + log file is better than a cloud-native, Kubernetes-backed, microservice-distributed pub/sub queue orchestrated by a CI/CD pipeline with GitOps and ChatOps and Slack notifications.

Bring back boring tech.

Own Less, Understand More

If you can’t explain your deployment stack to a junior developer in 5 minutes, maybe it’s not that you’re advanced — maybe it’s that you’re building a tower on quicksand.

Reframe “ownership” from:

  • “I’m responsible for 14 microservices”
    to
  • “I deeply understand the 2 services my team owns.”

More isn’t better.
Fewer things, done well, is how you build real reliability — not dashboards, not SLOs, not 17 stages of CI.

Embrace the Right Kind of Defaults

Stop rolling your own stack just to feel productive.

Use platforms that:

  • Have batteries included
  • Don’t force you to reinvent auth, routing, caching, queuing
  • Let you get from idea to product without setting up 17 services

Self-hosted? Use Fly.io, Railway, or a VPS with Docker Compose if it truly fits.

Cloud-native? Stick to one provider and use the minimum possible managed services.

Don’t chase multi-cloud unless your company makes billions.
Your personal blog doesn’t need global failover.

Use defaults until they hurt — only then replace them.

Fight the Culture War

We’ve created a dev culture where:

  • If you don’t use the “hot” stack, you’re seen as irrelevant
  • If you say “I use Heroku,” you’re laughed at
  • If you prefer monoliths, you must be “outdated”

This is toxic nonsense.

Tech is a tool, not a religion.

A tech stack is not a status symbol.
And deploying a stable app with no production issues for 5 years should earn more respect than wrestling with Kubernetes because it makes your resume look good.

We need to:

  • Celebrate simplicity
  • Reward engineers who remove complexity, not add it
  • Mentor juniors without gatekeeping
  • Make documentation part of engineering — not an afterthought
  • Build platforms that fade into the background

Restore Joy

Remember when you built your first app?

It probably didn’t scale.
It didn’t have unit tests.
It didn’t follow 12-factor guidelines.

But it worked.
And it was fun.

That joy gets lost when you’re forced to YAML-ify every idea, when deploying something means configuring 6 CLIs, a service mesh, RBAC, and a GitHub Action that keeps failing for reasons no one understands.

Let people build again.

Let side projects be simple.
Let MVPs stay messy.
Let startups ship without worrying about container orchestration.

Because joy is not a luxury — it’s the fuel of good software.

Final Words: The Revolution Is Quiet

There won’t be a big bang.

No one’s going to come on stage at KubeCon and say:

“We were wrong. This is too much. Let’s go back to basics.”

No.

The revolution will be:

  • Developers quietly switching to tools that respect their time
  • Teams cutting down on tech debt by reducing, not adding
  • Startups that say “no” to hype-driven development
  • Engineers who choose boring tech that works over sexy tech that breaks

And maybe — just maybe — in 5 years we’ll look back and say:

“Remember when everything got so bloated? Glad we snapped out of it.”

Let’s make that happen.
Quietly. Confidently. Together.

The End.

Or rather…
The Beginning of Simplicity.

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