Answer: THEY CANNOT.
But most still pretend they can.**
Let me break this down clearly and sharply so you understand the reality.
🧨 REALITY IN INDUSTRY (What you are seeing)
Most DevOps engineers:
run docker compose up
run kubectl apply
run CI/CD pipelines
deploy artifacts
restart services
tail logs
check status commands
But they don’t know:
how the application works
the internal configuration of Tomcat
Java memory parameters
Kafka listener mechanics
Redis persistence modes
MySQL replication
Nginx routing
Spring Boot internals
Node.js event loop
JVM tuning
So when a real issue comes?
🔥 They fail.
🔥 They panic.
🔥 They blame developers.
🔥 They waste hours searching StackOverflow and now chatgpt.
🔥 They only know commands, not technology.
🔥 WHO ACTUALLY FIXES REAL ISSUES?
A real DevOps or SRE must fix issues at multiple layers:
1.Infrastructure layer
CPU spikes
Disk I/O saturation
Memory leaks
Network bottlenecks
DNS issues
Firewall issues
Container cgroups limits
2.Container layer
wrong entrypoint
wrong environment variables
image corruption
storage permissions
networking problems
3.Application runtime layer
JVM options
Tomcat threads
connection pools
timeout issues
OOM errors
GC tuning
DB deadlocks
4.CI/CD layer
build failures
dependency issues
artifact problems
5.Monitoring/Alerting layer
false alarms
missing metrics
log misconfigurations
BUT YOU CANNOT FIX ANY OF THESE IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE TECHNOLOGY STACK.
🧠 WHY MOST DEVOPS ENGINEERS DON'T UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY STACK?
Because:
Companies ask for “DevOps skills = commands + tools”.
Trainings teach tools, not principles.
People think Docker hides complexity.
People think K8s will “auto-recover everything”.
Juniors copy/paste YAML and think they are DevOps.
Courses teach commands not technology.
Result:
❌ They know Jenkins but not build systems
❌ They know Docker but not container internals
❌ They know K8s but not networking or pod lifecycle
❌ They know MySQL image but not SQL concepts
❌ They know Kafka image but not Kafka partitions
🔥 REAL DEVOPS = YOU MUST KNOW THE TECHNOLOGY
A real DevOps engineer must know:
✔ What the app is built with (Java, Node, Python)
✔ How the framework works (Spring Boot, Django, Express)
✔ Runtime behavior (JVM, Python GIL, Node event loop)
✔ Storage patterns (DB queries, connection pools)
✔ Networking (TCP/IP, DNS, proxies, firewalls)
✔ Orchestration internals (Docker, K8s)
✔ Logs, metrics, tracing (observability)
✔ Deployment architectures (blue/green, canary)
Otherwise…
❌ You can’t diagnose
❌ You can’t troubleshoot
❌ You can’t do RCA
❌ You can’t fix production issues
❌ You become a button-click DevOps
❌ You get no career growth
🧲 SO WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? (THIS IS WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WANT)
I will back with real time scenarios and solutions for above.
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