The emperor has no clothes, and his name is CI/CD.
While teams celebrate their "mature DevOps practices" with elaborate Jenkins pipelines and GitOps workflows, they've missed a fundamental shift happening beneath their feet. What we call "best practices" in CI/CD today are actually common practices—repeated so often that we've forgotten to question whether they solve real problems or just create the illusion of progress.
The Problem: We're Optimizing for the Wrong Game
Walk into any "DevOps-mature" organization and you'll see the same theater: developers pushing code that triggers automated tests, builds Docker images, updates Helm charts, and deploys through staging environments before reaching production. Everyone feels productive. Velocity dashboards show green metrics. But here's what's actually happening:
Your CI/CD pipeline has become a bureaucracy with YAML syntax.
Teams spend more time maintaining their deployment infrastructure than building features. A typical enterprise CI/CD setup requires expertise in Jenkins/GitLab/GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, monitoring tools, security scanning, artifact registries, and secret management. That's not a pipeline—that's a full-time job disguised as automation.
The Uncomfortable Reality
The most successful teams I've observed don't have sophisticated CI/CD pipelines. They have something better: platforms that make pipelines irrelevant.
Netflix doesn't succeed because of their deployment pipeline. They succeed because they built an internal platform where deploying is as simple as changing a configuration value. Spotify's engineering velocity isn't about their CI/CD tools—it's about their developer platform that abstracts away infrastructure complexity entirely.
Solution: Platform Engineering Changes Everything
Platform engineering represents a fundamental rethinking of how we approach software delivery. Instead of giving every team the tools to build their own deployment pipeline, you build a platform that makes deployment pipelines unnecessary.
Here's the mental shift:
Traditional CI/CD Thinking: "How do we help teams deploy their code efficiently?"
Platform Engineering Thinking: "How do we eliminate deployment as a concern teams need to think about?"
A true platform approach means:
- Developers interact with business logic, not infrastructure
- Deployment becomes a platform capability, not a team responsibility
- Configuration replaces custom pipeline code
- Standards are enforced by the platform, not by process
Real-World Outcome: What Actually Works
I've seen this transformation firsthand. One organization reduced their deployment complexity from 47 different pipeline configurations across teams to a single platform interface. Development teams went from spending 30% of their time on deployment concerns to less than 5%. More importantly, their deployment frequency increased 10x while their failure rate dropped to near zero.
But here's the part that challenges conventional wisdom: they achieved this by eliminating most of their CI/CD tooling, not by improving it.
The Lesson: Common Practices ≠ Best Practices
The DevOps industry has confused popularity with effectiveness. We've adopted complex CI/CD practices because everyone else uses them, not because they solve our actual problems.
The future belongs to teams that recognize this distinction. While others build increasingly sophisticated pipelines, the leaders are building platforms that make pipelines obsolete.
The Strategic Question
Every hour your team spends configuring CI/CD tools is an hour not spent solving customer problems. Every YAML file they maintain is technical debt disguised as best practice.
Platform engineering isn't just the next evolution of DevOps it's the recognition that most of what we call DevOps today is waste.
The question isn't whether your CI/CD pipeline is sophisticated enough. The question is whether you're building a platform that makes CI/CD pipelines irrelevant.
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