DevOps Capabilities - A Reflection from 2017 to 2025

Back in 2017, when I co-authored a graduate paper on “DevOps Capabilities, Challenges, and Solutions” with brilliant peers under the guidance of an excellent professor during my graduate studies, we outlined four key capabilities that enterprises need to successfully adopt DevOps:

1. People
2. Process
3. Technology
4. Artifacts

At the time, this framework helped explain how DevOps goes beyond tools—it’s about culture, workflows, and the outputs we create and manage.

Today in 2025, I still see these four capabilities as essential. What has shifted is the way they are expressed and practiced across modern enterprise environments.

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People

• 2017: Collaboration and culture were the primary focus. HR’s role was to recruit for DevOps-ready mindsets and break down silos.
• 2025: Culture is still central, but HR practices are evolving with AI-driven recruiting, continuous learning, and skills mapping to keep teams adaptable in fast-changing tech landscapes.

Process

• 2017: Agile workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and automation were the core.
• 2025: AI is reshaping processes—from predictive analytics for incidents to generative AI for runbooks and self-healing pipelines. The process dimension now includes autonomy and intelligence.

Technology

• 2017: Cloud adoption, containers, and tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Docker were leading the way.
• 2025: Kubernetes is the baseline. GitOps, policy-as-code, platform engineering, and AI-augmented observability dominate. Technology keeps evolving, but the capability remains about enabling and scaling change.

Artifacts

• 2017: Builds, deployment packages, scripts, and monitoring logs formed the outputs of DevOps.
• 2025: Monitoring and observability systems now generate rich artifacts—metrics, traces, logs, and AI-generated insights. These artifacts are no longer passive byproducts but active drivers for decision-making and automation.

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Reflection

Even as AI transforms workflows and technologies continue to evolve, the four capabilities—People, Process, Technology, and Artifacts—remain the foundation of DevOps maturity.

This perspective is based on my own readings and thoughts, and it reminds me that while tools come and go, the core principles of DevOps endure.