I try to drop in and follow the devops scene from time to time; after all, a lot of my work ends up getting handled by this stuff, and sometimes you need to fix things yourself. From my point of view, listening to a devops talk is listening to a long monologue consisting of a chain of mostly food-related, seemingly unconnected English words ("Chef Cucumber Puppet Jenkins Salt") that somehow "run" on top of another. None of them are modular, none of them are interchangeable, there are no standards, whatever you write for one of the food-related items will not work with another food-related item, or the same food-related item of a different vintage. The shelf-life of the food-related items seems to be about 3 years.
From an outsider's perspective it feels that, aside from Nix, there has not been any theoretic or standards progress in this field since Mark Burgess' time.
Currently it seems Kubernetes is emerging from the fog as a de-facto standard to eliminate all those uncertainty points and provide a common toolset. It's the only orchestration platform that's a turnkey installtion and a turnkey managed service on all 3 major clouds. VMWare is about to open k8s up to the Enterprise market too with a integrated & managed on-prem service [btw VMWare employees: your PKS blog and cloud blog say this is happening mid december 2017... status update, maybe?...]...
With a shared deployment pane across the cloud and on-prem, wrapped in drag-and-drop tools from the major VM suppliers and sprinkled with "self-updating" magic and QOL improvements in the next few years, I believe we're at a watershed moment for a shared standard :)
Google is pretty good at tricking the industry into training techs for their internal stack.
I'm at Pivotal, we're working on it with VMware and Google. If you want to kick some of the tires, start playing with CFCR, because that's a major piece of PKS.
Because there wasn't much progress indeed. IT operations is a field advanced by programmers, and most programmers have very little experience with (or even interest in) system administration, so the progress of the field is mainly governed by clueless outsiders oblivious to all the tools and mechanisms already in use. That's why it's a huge pile of mess.
It seems that in a huge number of cases, its possible to trim out the vast majority of the layers of deployment/etc crap with just a bit of KISS and using tools which are already installed...
It was part of the reason I wanted to move on from my last position. We were spending so much time chasing infrastructure dependency changes that it began to feel like a treadmill that was slowly increasing speed. At some point I got tired and couldn't find the heart to debug yet another vagrant up failure, knowing that fixing it will probably break something else, and the actual project work was just as likely to suffer from the same issue.
At home I keep it simple, and my advice to a sole developer or small team looking at some of these infrastructure platforms and tools thinking they need them: these tools are not for your use case.
You don't need vagrant, docker, kubernetes to manage a 4 person dev team and you are just burning hours and building the chain of brittle tooling that will be your biggest pain point until you eventually hire a sadist/devops guy.