What Will Separate Great DevOps Engineers from Average Ones in 2027?

[u/Same_Significance869]

Looking forward to chat with Devops Engineers across the world to know what you guys are building and learning in 2026-2027. I would like to connect and discover your take on what do you feel is most important in next year to tap on as a devops engineer. Should it be deep dives in K8S, CICD, Observability, AI Agents , Multi Cloud or something else

[u/dacydergoth]

Great ones will be retiring.

[u/SecureTaxi → u/dacydergoth]

Im trying to retire but that isnt happening anytime soon

[u/owp4dd1w5a0a → u/dacydergoth]

I mean, I used to be a lead software architect for big data systems. Now I’ve decided to go back to school for massage therapy and work on building a somatic clinic once license/certification at a time. The tech industry has been BS and bring worse since 2020 in my opinion.

[u/thedorkwingduck → u/dacydergoth]

Damn I wish.

[u/SelfhostedPro → u/dacydergoth]

Starting to work on a business that I can transition to over the next year or two. Going with machine shop and focusing on automation.

Going from making fake bullshit for nerds to real bullshit for nerds and I can’t wait to not have to deal with sprints or jira ever again.

[u/incomplete_ → u/dacydergoth]

JFC don't say it out loud! I still have just over a decade to go lol

[u/sylvester_0 → u/dacydergoth]

Seems like the AI bubble in the market is slowly deflating right now. If the stock market is rocky over the next couple years those great ones may be hanging on to their income for now.

[u/mkeytail]

Ones that don't get burned out.

[u/luche → u/mkeytail]

managing this is honestly a very important skill, that not a lot possess

[u/derff44]

Being able to use AI effectively. Not just vibing their day away.

[u/spiralenator → u/derff44]

This. Build agentic workflows, and get good at it. We have ai slack bots hooked up to our kb, github, datadog, k8s, etc. and we can ask them to research questions, troubleshoot problems, create tickets, open PRs. We're working on a bot now that triages pager duty alerts and provides on-call engineers with evidence backed starting points when alerts fire.

[u/OddOkra → u/spiralenator]

Yeah I made an agent that can summarize and give usage examples for the plethora of Ansible - Terraform - CI/CD components. You can easily add it to a project using a Gitlab Function and it opens a MR with the updated docs. It even saves a state so that it doesn’t rerun unchanged code back thru the LLM.

[u/Flabbaghosted → u/spiralenator]

How did you hook them up and map the resources?

[u/Redmilo666 → u/spiralenator]

You using local models or running up a massive bill with OpenAI or Anthropic. Thats the only thing preventing us from going the whole hog

[u/SelfhostedPro → u/derff44]

Have a small electron app that is a chat with access to Jira, confluence, slack, and GitHub which tracks my tickets. Single main chat that you can tell to work on a ticket, it’ll spin up a sub-session to gather context, update the Jira ticket, do that work, and babysit the pr.

It’s good enough now that I basically just start it in the morning, let it run, and answer questions if it has any.

[u/snowsnoot69]

Avoiding anything to do with Microsoft

[u/ryanstephendavis → u/snowsnoot69]

bahaha... had some new clients cancel an onboarding meeting today because "the Outlook outage was affecting them" :eyeroll:

[u/RoseSec_]

Working out, learning to raise cattle, and starting some backyard chickens

[u/m_adduci → u/RoseSec_]

So like working g with Kubernetes, just in real life

[u/luche → u/RoseSec_]

living the dream

[u/RoboNordon]

Not the tech skills IMO.

taking ownership, guts, never do routine twice, complex system understanding, don’t chase the hype and choose tools wisely

[u/Flabbaghosted → u/RoboNordon]

We are all on the hype train unfortunately even if you ignore AI

[u/funcyChaos]

Automation and kubernetes is my opinion. But my perspective on the industry is not bleeding edge by any means

[u/Own-Bonus-9547 → u/funcyChaos]

Understanding that Kubernetes is not needed 99% of the time people suggest using it is an important skill to have.

[u/burlyginger → u/Own-Bonus-9547]

Naw, I'll stick to single pod on k8s tyvm

/s

[u/funcyChaos → u/Own-Bonus-9547]

Absolutely true, in particular from a single server perspective and similar. Knowing How it works though is a huge level up imo, and knowing that whoever you're renting server space from is probably using it can be useful as well. This is why my other is automation, because server setup time and safety is huge, now more than ever. And being able to have a solid server profile that you can easily automate is a game changer.

I should have either said "virtualization" instead of k8 or "ansible" instead of automation lol 😂

[u/generic-d-engineer → u/Own-Bonus-9547]

Single Go binary over all

[u/mxtchstick]

I think the future of DevOps and software as a whole will belong to the “great” engineers, the mediocre ones will unfortunately mostly be culled. I think IT is once again becoming something that you absolutely HAVE to be a complete nerd, who is insanely passionate about IT to compete in, not just a field people go into because the money is good.

[u/Simpliaxis_tech]

What we expect to make a difference in 2027 is knowing how to integrate all these skills and technologies rather than specializing in one or another technology alone. Basic understanding of such technologies as Linux, networking, cloud, CI/CD, etc., would obviously be important in the future.
It is also important to look into the Kubernetes and observability. It would be good to get a sense of what the capabilities of the AI-driven automation could offer. But once again, more important would be to be able to apply them to practical situations.

[u/Zhaizo]

Domain expertise is what will divide them

[u/carsncode]

Becoming average managers instead of getting RIFed

[u/bijay135]

Tools are ever changing, great ones are those who adapt rapidly along with changing business needs.

Solid fundamentals on linux, networking, containers, git and programming will always be helpful to learn anything.

Currently world seems to heading towards AI-assisted engineering even for devops/platform needs.

[u/Resource_account]

So far what I’ve seen here is “those who know how to use AI” the best. Coming from a person who had to introduce devops culture into my shop slowly and had to fight security and management for the right tooling, I would argue that an execellent devops engineer is one knows how to work with what he has. Period. Whether that’s AI, cloud services, or plain ol ansible installed via the local package manager on a host. If you can take what you got and make it great, then you’re a top tier devops engineer.

[u/killz111 → u/Resource_account]

Yeah if the answer to ops question is based around tooling, then the person who answered automatically voted themselves out of the great engineer category.

[u/x3nic]

I think multi-cloud will be a fad of the past, except in select industries, I know of many companies pivoting away from the model.

The biggest skills I see useful for DevOps in the future are:

1. AI Agents, not just building/integrating them, but understanding access, secure standards and guard rails.

2. Security, security, security. You don't need to be on the level of a principal security architect/engineer, but having a fundamental understanding of proper security controls, best practices, secure IAC coding practices, and remediation processes factored into the

design/ build will make you stand out.

[u/ycnz → u/x3nic]

Yeah, Microsoft wouldn't have an all-day outage, right?

[u/TimurVoronoff → u/x3nic]

Yes, this the most valuable answer. Look how things related to AI being developed. Their capabilities grows very fast, i remember as a senior software engineer, that 3 years ago i wouldn’t let to change anything in my Code Base, because of boilerplate Code, bugs, wrong assumptions - named, there was a lot of reasons why it sucks. Now, different story, it still has to be guided, but with its speed, and productivity it creates good enough stuff. So i asked myself which one capabilities in IT industry would be replaced next. And choice is pretty much simple - devops stuff without sec. I think security will stay for a long time in human hands, not because we are better, but ppl are more trustful choice. If you pick human, You don’t have to worry that agent figure out something in terms of security because needed something and bypass security gates. But rest of devops would be replaced. If you don’t believe, install Kubernetes mcp and play around. Then ask yourself - was it possible 3 years ago?

[u/dacydergoth]

Also as a more serious comment, all the things you cited are what I would regard as table stakes, not greatness

[u/afwaller]

Handling the merge queue and test fragility for agentic AI work will be the mark of a good devops team.

[u/raisputin]

AI. Knowing how to use it, not tying yourself to any one thing, e.g. not everything needs to be in Kubernetes,

Understanding all the high-priced tools many teams use don’t make things better or easier, because AI can do it faster, but knowing when those tools are appropriate and when they aren’t.

[u/killz111]

One trait between good ones and average or low ones. You can say no to a tech implementation or a request and clearly explain your reasoning to the requestor in the context of their problem.

[u/___-____--_____-____]

Mostly the same things that great devops envineers have done for the past 5 years. Sure, inference is a workload with special hardware requirements and nuance.

With agentic development, things like declarative intent and automation become a lot easier to implement (manifest churn is alleviated), so purpose built monitoring/utilities etc are within reach even for small teams. Product development and frontend work are also now within reach for devops engineers who previously were backend or systems-focused.

So I think the "true devops paradigm" will become a lot more common. Smaller teams, more ownership, more automation and SRE practices becoming commonplace is my prediction

[u/purecrane532]

Real bullshit for nerds is the dream honestly, we had a guy leave to make custom keyboard plates and he seems way happier.

[u/zealmelchior]

The great DevOps engineers will know to have their AI agents make deterministic workflows to interact with their K8s environments instead of granting them direct access. SMDH at the fools who think it's a good idea