Welcome to 'In Conversation With' — a series by QXi, featuring the voices behind our three specialist brands: Montash, Remobi and Trillion.
Through candid conversations with technology leaders, innovators, and experts, we explore the ideas shaping the future of tech - from the conception of the DevOps movement and cloud systems to remote work, cybersecurity and everything in between.
The first episode of our series is hosted by Montash Senior Consultant Talib Shah, and joined by long time Linux and Open Source Consultant, and instigator of the DevOps movement, Kris Buytaert.
To listen to the full episode, click here.
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Talib Shah (TS): Kris, you helped found the DevOps movement back in 2009. That’s a big deal. Before we dive in - what’s one misconception people often have about you?
Kris Buytaert (KB): People assume I dislike certain tools because I’ve criticised them. I like many of these tools - when used properly. What frustrates me is when teams blindly adopt tech without understanding its purpose or context. That’s when things break.
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TS: Let’s rewind to Ghent, Belgium, 2009. DevOpsDays is happening for the first time. What problem were you trying to solve?
KB: It was spontaneous. Patrick Debois and I met at a cloud camp and realised we had mutual friends, similar challenges, and a shared desire to bring people together. We wanted to connect folks who were building large-scale open-source infrastructures, experimenting with early cloud tech like Eucalyptus, and exploring agile practices. The name DevOps came after the concept - it just captured what we were doing: devs and ops working together.
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TS: Did you have any idea it would become what it is today?
KB: Absolutely not. It started as a gathering of like-minded people. After Ghent, folks like John Willis took it to the US, and soon after we saw events popping up all over - Australia, Europe, everywhere. By 2013, DevOpsDays were happening in every major city.
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TS: What was the biggest challenge in getting the DevOps movement accepted?
KB: Ironically, its popularity. DevOps quickly became a buzzword. Suddenly everyone was hiring “DevOps engineers” - a title we never intended. DevOps was meant to describe a way of working, not a job title. The worst cases? Companies that just shoved a DevOps team between dev and ops, adding more silos instead of breaking them down.
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TS: So, what does real DevOps culture look like?
KB: It’s about ownership and trust. Teams that are empowered to build, run, and fix their own software. Management exists to support, not micromanage. It’s agile, not waterfall with a new label. The opposite is a command-and-control setup where people communicate through managers and releases take weeks. That’s not DevOps.
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TS: Follow-the-sun models are often discussed in DevOps circles. Do they work?
KB: Only if you're Google or Microsoft. Spreading a team across 24 hours kills communication. Most organisations just can’t make it work. For startups, it's not worth the pain.
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TS: If a company is stuck in “fake DevOps,” what’s the first thing they should fix?
KB: Leadership. If leadership isn’t truly committed to change, the rest doesn’t matter. I've seen companies only take DevOps seriously after a major outage. Sadly, some respond by locking everything down - which only increases risk.
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TS: There’s a lot of talk about NoOps, platform engineering… are these evolutions or just rebrands?
KB: NoOps is marketing hype. Platform engineering? That’s real - but it’s not new. We've been doing it for over a decade. It’s about creating self-service platforms and guardrails for developers. If anything, the title platform engineer is more accurate than DevOps engineer - it describes the job better.
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TS: What’s your take on observability? Is it living up to the hype?
KB: Most companies aren’t even doing basic monitoring right. They jump into observability without clean metrics, alerting, or logs. Fix your foundations first. Once you have good data, then you can move toward observability maturity - but it takes time.
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TS: You’ve always championed open source. Why is it so central to DevOps?
KB: Because it’s about culture. Open source attracts engineers who want to understand, contribute and improve. It’s not about the license - it’s about solving problems together. That spirit aligns with everything DevOps stands for.
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TS: For engineers who want to get involved in open source but don’t know where to start?
KB: Start small. Write documentation, fix a minor bug, or share your experience. You don’t need to be a top coder - there’s a place for everyone in open source.
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TS: Last one. If DevOps had a theme song, what would it be?
KB: There is one! A guy named David Lutz performed a DevOps song at DevOpsDays Mountain View in 2012. I’ll dig out the link - it’s a classic.
[Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYLxw6OsZug]
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TS: We’ll be waiting for it! Kris, thank you. This has been brilliant. Where can people follow your work?
KB: I'm most active on Mastodon these days. Less noise, more conversation.
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Whether you’re deep into your DevOps journey or just getting started, Kris’s insights are a timely reminder that culture, not just tooling, is what makes or breaks great engineering teams.
At Montash, we work with organisations around the world to help them build those very teams - from DevOps to platform engineering and everything in between. If you’re looking for the people who can lead with purpose, challenge convention, and build for scale - we’d love to talk.
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To get in touch with Talib Shah, click here, or to learn more about Kris Buytaert, you can head to his website, found here.
