Latest from Alan
DevOps Has Always Been Hard to Define. Does a Standard Help?
The new DevOps Standard deserves a serious reading. Its lasting value will depend on whether it helps organizations apply shared principles as people and agents take on different responsibilities.
Oct 7, 2026 · 3 minAll articles by Alan Shimel
Showing 1–24DevOps Dozen 2026 Nominations Are Open: Recognizing the People and Technology Moving DevOps Forward
When we launched the DevOps Dozen in 2015, we wanted to recognize the people, projects and companies helping this community move forward. We saw the work happening across DevOps every day at DevOps.com. The awards gave our readers a chance to tell us who deserved recognition. Eleven years later, there is a lot more ground […]
Introducing Futurum Media: Why Futurum, Why Now?
Techstrong, Tech Field Day and Visible Impact come together, backed by the research, intelligence and expertise of The Futurum Group.
Keeping Humans Accountable as AI Agents Take On the SDLC
Ming Wu joins Alan Shimel to explain governed agent loops, shared context and traceability across AI-assisted development, with people remaining accountable for the results.
Headless DevOps Gives AI Agents Access to Delivery Workflows
Federico Larsen joins Alan Shimel to examine agent-accessible delivery workflows, API and MCP interfaces, and the testing and security checks needed for headless DevOps.
AI Has Turned Verification Into the New DevOps Bottleneck
The next DevOps challenge is not generating more software. It is proving, quickly and repeatedly, that a growing volume of machine-generated change is fit to ship.
From the Horse’s Mouth: Anthropic Says AI Has Changed the SDLC
Anthropic’s AI-native SDLC playbook argues that faster coding is shifting the bottleneck to planning, testing, governance, deployment and operations.
Trusted Open Source Catalogs for AI and Developers
Leslie Pascual of ActiveState joins Alan Shimel to explain why trusted open source catalogs — not after-the-fact scanners — are becoming table stakes as AI agents pull components at machine speed.
The AI Agent Race Is On. But Are We Watching the Right Race?
Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and a growing field of challengers are competing to define the future of software development. A new Techstrong special report examines who is ahead, how the race should be measured and what enterprises need to consider before placing their bets. Which AI coding agent is winning? It sounds […]
AI Raises the Stakes for Observability Engineering
Honeycomb’s Liz Fong-Jones joins Alan Shimel to explain why observability engineering has become the real bottleneck in AI-assisted development — and how agent-assisted workflows are reshaping the loop.
Why Agentic Coding Needs Governance at Scale
CloudBees CEO Moritz Plassnig joins Alan Shimel to explain why agentic coding is exposing every unfinished piece of the DevOps transformation — and why AI-scale delivery needs AI-scale governance.
Anaconda Doesn’t Want to Be Just the Python Company Anymore
The question is no longer whether Anaconda wants to be more than the Python company. It is how much of the AI development stack DeSanto ultimately intends to own.
Mezmo Open Sources AI SRE Operations
Site reliability engineering has been quietly buckling under its own success. The scope of what SRE teams are expected to own — observability, incident response, telemetry pipelines, capacity, cost, resilience — keeps growing while the tools underneath fragment further. AI is showing up as both the reason the workload keeps expanding and the most credible […]
Why Your Best People Can’t Save a Broken Delivery System
When delivery falls apart, the reflex is to blame the team. Missed dates, quality slips, a burned-out squad — leadership tends to reach for a personnel fix and quietly move on. The uncomfortable pattern in most enterprise organizations is that the system itself is the failure mode. Decision latency, priority misalignment, and layers of governance […]
Platform Engineering vs. DevOps: Why This Is the Wrong Question
DevOps has done what it was supposed to do. It broke down the wall between development and operations, it made continuous delivery a normal expectation, it made shared ownership of production a cultural default, and it moved software delivery from a scheduled event to a continuous flow. The results reshaped how modern software gets built. […]
AI Is Accelerating How Fast We Build the Wrong Thing
AI coding assistants have made it trivially easy to ship software faster — and that is precisely the problem. Human developers used to absorb the gaps in a vague spec by asking questions, reading between the lines and quietly steering toward something useful. AI tools do not work that way. They take incomplete requirements at […]
The Automation Layer Wants to Own Enterprise AI
Organizations want AI systems capable of prioritizing alerts, routing workflows, coordinating across applications, initiating remediation steps, summarizing operational data and adapting dynamically based on changing context. The system is no longer following a rigid set of instructions. It is participating in operational decision-making. That changes the operational risk profile dramatically. When deterministic automation fails, the blast radius is usually constrained. Probabilistic systems introduce a completely different level of complexity because behavior can evolve dynamically during runtime.
We Spent 15 Years Automating Infrastructure. Now We’re Automating Decisions
As DevOps shifts from deterministic infrastructure automation to AI-driven probabilistic judgment, organizations face a profound transition from automating tasks to automating operational reasoning. Discover why this requires a fundamental evolution in platform engineering, trust, and governance.
CI/CD Was Built for Deterministic Software — Agents Just Broke the Model
CI/CD was built around a comforting idea: Software should do tomorrow what it did today, assuming the inputs are the same. That assumption sits underneath a lot of modern DevOps. It is why we have build pipelines, test suites, artifact repositories, deployment gates, rollback strategies, infrastructure-as-code and all the other machinery that turned software delivery […]
GitLab Act 2: Still an Open Book
An analysis of GitLab’s “Act 2” transition under CEO Bill Staples, examining whether the company can successfully pivot to an AI-native, agentic software delivery model while dismantling the radically transparent, remote-first culture that originally defined its brand and operational success.
DevOps Experience 2026: The DevOps Community Confronts the Agentic AI Race
Agentic AI is rapidly entering DevOps pipelines, platform engineering platforms and cloud-native infrastructure. DevOps Experience 2026 brings the community together to decide which tools matter, how they should be governed and what comes next. The DevOps ecosystem is entering one of its most consequential transitions since the rise of CI/CD. Across the industry, vendors are […]
Why Techstrong is Heading to Prague for SUSECON: Sovereignty, Open Infrastructure and the Future of AI
As enterprises worldwide rethink control of the stack in the age of AI, SUSECON lands at the intersection of sovereignty, open infrastructure and the next generation of enterprise platforms.
Why Code Validation is the Next Frontier
Shared staging environments were never designed for a world where dozens of changes land in a codebase every hour. Yet most engineering teams still depend on them as the primary checkpoint before production. Alan Shimel and Arjun Iyer, CEO of Signadot, dig into why that model is falling apart and what needs to replace it. […]
Giving AI Agents the Keys to Real Infrastructure
AI coding assistants can generate pull requests faster than most teams can review them, and that mismatch is creating a new kind of bottleneck across engineering organizations. The volume of AI-generated code is growing rapidly, but without a reliable way to validate that code against real production environments, teams are left choosing between slowing down […]