Will GenAI Take Your DevOps Job?

DevOps and genAl are together setting up a new paradigm that endangers conventional DevOps roles. But for those who embrace change, there is little to be worried about.

- Sourav Kairi and Dibyendu Banerjee

Generative AI is no longer limited to writing essays or creating art; it has now entered the backend writing infrastructure as code, automating CI/CD pipelines, diagnosing incidents, and proposing fixes as they occur. Agentic AI systems are simulating SRE (site reliability engineering) roles and optimising observability tools, which leads to the big question: what happens to the traditional DevOps engineers, when machines are thinking and acting-on their behalf?

Is generative AI going to assist or replace DevOps engineers? Are they becoming supervisors of AI, or are they being replaced by intelligent agents that never sleep and don't misconfigure YAML?

With increasing automated tools for software delivery, deployment, and packaging, and increasing intelligence within existing pipelines, we know one thing: DevOps careers are at an inflection point. The future is being written, line by AI generated line. The one question that remains is: will you be in the loop?

For more than a decade, DevOps has driven modern software delivery, breaking down silos and increasing the pace of innovation. However, as generative AI enters the stage, this special practice is going through disruption as well. The very pipelines DevOps built are now being automated with AI that can self-heal, optimise, and deploy with no human action. As companies start transitioning their processes from manual tuning to autonomous operations, those in the DevOps profession are facing serious questions. The answer isn’t binary. It’s a call to adapt. The reality is that we must embrace the shifting ground underneath the DevOps role due to the growth of AI in operations.

Why the traditional DevOps role is under pressure