Remember when “you build it, you run it” felt like a superpower? DevOps broke down the walls between development and operations, and it fundamentally changed how we ship software for the better.
But let’s be honest about what that model looks like in practice today.
<h3>The CNCF Landscape: A Map, Not a Vehicle</h3>
To run modern cloud-native applications, you need tools for orchestration, CI/CD, secret management, observability, and networking. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has incubated incredible technologies to solve these problems.
But have you looked at the CNCF Landscape map recently? It’s massive.
We shifted everything left, expecting developers to navigate this ecosystem on their own. Suddenly, writing a Go or Spring Boot microservice requires you to wrestle with Kubernetes manifests, tweak an Ansible playbook, configure Prometheus metrics, and ensure your AWS IAM roles are compliant.
We forced developers to become part-time sysadmins and cloud architects. This isn’t empowerment; it’s cognitive overload.
<h3>The Structural Fix: Platform Engineering</h3>
The solution isn’t going back to siloed Ops teams. It’s Platform Engineering.
Instead of expecting every developer to master the entire cloud-native ecosystem, dedicated platform teams treat the internal developer experience as a product. They build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that abstracts away the underlying complexity, providing a “Golden Path” to production.
To build a true Golden Path, platform teams are standardizing on a “Best of CNCF” stack:
<ul>
<li>Developer Portals: Backstage for a single pane of glass.</li>
<li>GitOps &amp; Delivery: Flux and Argo Workflows for declarative, automated deployments.</li>
<li>Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Fluent Bit for unified metrics, traces, and logs.</li>
<li>Scaling &amp; Networking: KEDA for event-driven autoscaling, and Cilium for eBPF-based networking.</li>
<li>Security &amp; Secrets: cert-manager and External Secrets Operator to keep configurations locked down.</li>
</ul>
<h3>The “Gluing” Problem (And How to Fix It)</h3>
The tools listed above are incredible. But here is the hard truth: stitching them together takes months of engineering time. If your company spends 80% of its time building and maintaining the platform, and only 20% building the actual business product, you haven’t solved the DevOps problem — you’ve just moved it.
This is where the ecosystem is evolving next: pre-integrated, open-source platforms.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, check out <a href="https://openchoreo.dev/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">OpenChoreo</a>. It is a CNCF sandbox project designed to be a complete, open-source developer platform for Kubernetes.
Instead of spending six months gluing Argo, Flux, Backstage, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus together, OpenChoreo integrates these exact “best-in-class” CNCF tools into a single, unified IDP.
<ul>
<li>It gives developers higher-level abstractions (projects, components, endpoints) so they don’t have to deal with raw Kubernetes YAML.</li>
<li>It embeds observability and GitOps by default.</li>
<li>It provides a modular architecture that scales from a local k3d cluster to massively distributed fleets.</li>
</ul>
Platform Engineering doesn’t kill DevOps; it scales it. By leveraging unified platforms like OpenChoreo, we can finally drop the cognitive load, shrink cycle times, and let developers get back to doing what they do best: writing brilliant code.

The Evolution of DevOps: From Cognitive Overload to Golden Paths