In the early days of software, deploying an application was a bespoke craft. Today, modern startups simply can't afford to custom-build their infrastructure from scratch for each product. It's 2025, and there's no justification for every company reinventing the wheel when it comes to cloud infrastructure. Compute and storage—the foundational elements powering our applications—became commodities long ago. Now, it's inevitable that DevOps tools workflows will follow suit and become commodities themselves. Neglecting DevOps and developer self-service capabilities will cost both SMBs and enterprises—not just in dollars, but in slower deployment cycles and lost time.
The Evolution of Cloud (and Complexity) - Why Developer Self-Service is Necessary
In the early 2000s, companies would physically rack servers in data centers to run their applications. Owning and operating infrastructure meant buying hardware, installing operating systems, wiring up power and networking, and configuring the basics before even writing a line of code.
Then, came the cloud. In the beginning, cloud computing was blissfully simple. AWS launched EC2 and S3 in 2006, offering on-demand servers and storage that felt revolutionary. The promise was clear: rent compute by the hour and storage by the gigabyte, no data center required. Google and Microsoft soon followed with respective offerings.
However, as cloud adoption grew, so did complexity. Early AWS was simple, but enterprises needed more – isolation, security, control. Amazon responded with a flurry of new services that solved problems while adding new layers to the stack. For example, in 2009 AWS introduced Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to let companies carve out private networks in the cloud. In 2010 they rolled out Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained security controls, and soon after, CloudFormation to allow infrastructure-as-code templates. Each was a game-changer for what you could do in the cloud – isolated networks, least-privilege access, repeatable environments – but each also made the job of managing infrastructure more nuanced and complicated.
By the mid-2010s, every major cloud provider was racing to offer more services and features. In response to Heroku’s success that was built on top of AWS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk emerged in 2011. Google launched Compute Engine VMs in 2012 to complement its App Engine, and introduced services analogous to AWS’s – virtual networks, IAM controls, and its own Deployment Manager for infra-as-code. Microsoft Azure, which started with a simpler PaaS model, added Virtual Machines and a robust Resource Manager template system by 2014.
Meanwhile, the container revolution was in full swing – Docker blew up in 2013, and Google open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014. Kubernetes offered a unified way to run containers across clouds, but it also pushed operational complexity to new heights with its myriad of YAML definitions, controllers, and moving parts.
Each step made the cloud more powerful but also more convoluted to manage. AWS alone now offers over 200 distinct services, and the other providers are not far behind. The cloud “operating system” that DevOps teams must master is immense.
Compute and Storage: Now Cheap Commodities
The irony is that while the cloud’s feature set has exploded, the core compute and storage have become commodities in the true economic sense. Need a server for a week? You can get an EC2 instance in seconds. Need to store a few terabytes? Dump it into S3 and pay pennies per GB. Ubiquitous high-speed networks and global data centers mean compute is accessible like electricity.
So why isn’t shipping software just as easy? If raw infrastructure is like water flowing freely, why do so many teams still feel like they’re digging wells and laying custom pipes to actually use it? The answer lies in the DevOps workflows – the continuous integration, delivery, monitoring, and everything around the raw compute. Every team is left to assemble their own toolchain and processes to get code from a developer’s laptop into a scalable, monitored production system. In 2025, deploying a web app still too often feels like artisan work when it should feel like turning a faucet.
From Prototype to Production: Evolving Needs (and Headaches)
It’s helpful to consider how a startup’s infrastructure needs evolve through the product lifecycle.
In the prototype stage, speed is king. A couple of developers will do whatever gets the product demo-ready: hardcode some configs, deploy manually to a server or use a quick PaaS platform for convenience. Downtime isn’t a big concern; you might not even have real users yet. At this stage, it’s common (and totally fine) to cut corners in DevOps – nobody sets up a full Kubernetes cluster and CI pipeline for a throwaway prototype.
As you reach a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and start onboarding early customers, the stakes rise. You probably introduce a staging environment to test features before users see them. Maybe you set up a rudimentary CI system to run tests, and use something like GitHub Actions or Jenkins to automate deployments to a staging server. Logs become more important now to debug customer issues, so you might integrate a logging service or at least aggregate logs somewhere. Still, with a small team, much of this is ad-hoc. Perhaps one engineer becomes the de facto “DevOps person” in addition to their development duties, writing scripts to reset the database or deploying hotfixes at odd hours.
By the time you have a production system with real users and revenue on the line, DevOps can no longer remain an afterthought. At scale (or even moderate scale), the cost of ignoring proper infrastructure is simply too high. Downtime directly hits your business – in lost user trust and lost dollars. A confusing deployment process becomes a bottleneck that slows feature releases to a crawl. Security gaps or lack of monitoring can lead to data breaches or multi-hour outages. In short, the scrappy DIY approach hits a wall. Many startups face a crisis at this point: either scramble to retrofit robust DevOps practices under pressure, or suffer the consequences (and many do suffer public outages, missed SLAs, or exorbitant cloud bills due to inefficiencies).
And then once you have mature product, the company has a sizable engineering team. Reliability, uptime, and performance are critical due to a broad user base and possibly SLA commitments. DevOps evolves into full-blown platform engineering – perhaps a “DevOps team” or “SRE team” exists by now to build internal tools, manage clusters, and optimize CI pipelines. The tech stack might involve containers, orchestration (Kubernetes or serverless frameworks), comprehensive monitoring/alerting, automated canary deployments, etc. At this stage, your DevOps setup might be quite sophisticated (and developer self-service is not necessary), but it likely took enormous effort and iterations (and possibly some incidents along the way) to get there. And that’s not the end of it. You need to keep up with latest security patches and never ending version upgrades for your infra.
Not every startup follows this exact timeline, but the pattern is common. Crucially, if you delay investing in DevOps until late in the game, you often pay a heavy price to catch up.
DevOps Can’t Be an Afterthought (Speed and Stability Demand It) - Developer Self-Service is the way to go!
At this point, it should be clear that DevOps is not “nice to have” if you plan to scale – it’s a foundational necessity. In the era of cloud-native applications, continuous delivery, and five-nines uptime expectations, leaving DevOps for later is courting disaster. Startups today operate in environments where users expect rapid improvements without service interruptions. If you don’t meet that bar, a competitor will. That’s why even at tiny startups, concepts like site reliability and observability have trickled down – because a five-minute outage or a security breach can be the difference between life and death for an early-stage product’s reputation.
Scale: You might be fine running on a single server with no automation when you have 50 users. But if you’re successful and suddenly have 50,000, manual processes implode. It’s incredibly hard to retrofit scalability; far easier if your pipeline and architecture are built on scalable foundations (e.g. container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, automated scaling) from early on.
Uptime & Reliability: Users don’t care if you’re a lean startup – if your app is down, they’ll leave. And downtime is almost never just “bad luck”; it often traces to process and infrastructure issues: a deploy gone wrong, lack of staging tests, no auto-recovery, missing monitoring alert, etc. By treating DevOps as a first-class citizen, you bake in reliability from the start. In contrast, teams that wing it often discover a show-stopping bug in production because they didn’t have a true production-like test environment – a painful lesson that costs real users. Uptime is a direct outcome of your DevOps maturity.
Speed of Iteration (Time-to-Market): This is huge for startups. Your ability to iterate on feedback and deliver new features quickly can make or break your product-market fit. It doesn’t matter how great your engineers are if deploying their code is slow or risky. If your competitor can deploy 10 times a day and you can only do it once a week, you’re at a serious disadvantage in experimenting and responding to users. DevOps directly influences business agility; developer self-service can help accomplish this. It cannot be separated from product iteration velocity. Fast CI/CD and confident releases mean you can try ideas, fix bugs, and deliver value at a rhythm that keeps you ahead of the pack.
Security & Data Protection: In the age of data breaches and privacy laws, neglecting infrastructure security is courting disaster. DevOps isn’t just about speed; it’s also about doing things in a repeatable, auditable way. A cobbled-together deployment process might bypass safety checks, leave ports open, or fail to rotate keys. When infrastructure is commoditized and automated, security best practices can be baked in: role-based access, encrypted secrets, proper network segmentation, etc., all applied consistently. Products that have continuous deployment pipelines can also more easily integrate automated security scans and tests, catching vulnerabilities before they hit prod. And when (not if) a security issue does arise, a well-instrumented system will alert you immediately and let you respond, whereas a haphazard one might keep you in the dark until far too late. In essence, DevOps done right is preventive medicine for security and data issues; thiat is why using a developer self-service platform like Kapstan is necessary for SMB teams, or even teams within enterprise companies.
Cost Efficiency: Effective DevOps practices directly impact your cloud infrastructure expenses. Poorly managed infrastructure often leads to spiralling cloud bills—unused instances left running, oversized databases, inefficient data pipelines, and resources that aren’t rightsized or scaled appropriately. By adopting automated, well-architected DevOps processes early, you optimize resource usage, avoid waste, and significantly reduce your ongoing operational costs.
As the famous adage goes, “Every company is a software company” in today’s world. We’d add that every successful software company, whether they know it or not, is investing in DevOps one way or another. The smart ones do it deliberately and early, treating it as core infrastructure. The others do it painfully and late, treating it as emergency plumbing work after the building is flooded.
Then why is DevOps still hand-crafted as not self-service?
Today, platforms like Cursor are redefining how developers write code. We are all “vibe-coding” but deploying and scaling applications remains unnecessarily complex. Developers—experienced or not—still must navigate a confusing maze of AWS services, IAM permissions, YAML configurations, and monitoring dashboards.
Platforms as a Service (PaaS) such as Vercel, Heroku and Render do simplify deployments but come with rigid constraints, limiting customization as startups scale and their needs evolve. This lack of flexibility and spiking costs at scale often forces developers back into manually configuring infrastructure, negating the initial simplicity.
Despite advances in coding experiences, infrastructure workflows have yet to benefit from similar commoditization. It's time for DevOps itself to adopt a "vibe-driven," standardized, yet flexible approach, empowering teams to innovate freely without infrastructure friction.
Consider some of the critical DevOps components that are not one-click commodities today:
- CI/CD Pipelines: Setting up continuous integration and delivery is a project of its own. Teams juggle Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or other tools, write custom scripts to build and deploy, handle secrets and credentials, and deal with broken builds. There is no universally adopted “CI/CD service” as ubiquitous as EC2 – instead, every company stitches together their own. Misconfigurations and script errors often cause deployment delays or outages (as many teams at scale can ruefully attest).
- Infrastructure as Code: Yes, tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, and Helm exist – but using them is still more of a craft than a commodity. Writing Terraform modules or CloudFormation templates is akin to writing code, with all the potential for bugs. There’s tremendous power in IaC, but no out-of-the-box standard that just sets up a baseline infrastructure for you. Instead, startups often spend months building and tweaking their IaC scripts for their specific needs.
- Observability (Monitoring & Logging): Every cloud offers basic monitoring (e.g. CloudWatch on AWS, Stackdriver on GCP), but making sense of logs and metrics across distributed systems is hard. Many teams pay for third-party monitoring (Datadog, New Relic, etc.) or assemble open-source stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK stack) to gain visibility. It’s work to wire these up correctly. Small teams commonly delay setting up robust monitoring due to the effort, flying blind longer than they should – until a major outage forces the issue.
- Environment Parity: “Works on my machine” remains a joke because achieving true parity between development, staging, and production is tricky. Containerization and tools like Docker Compose have helped, but ensuring that your laptop, the test environment, and production behave the same still requires discipline and tooling. Network configs, environment variables, database states – the differences creep in. Big firms invest in elaborate frameworks to simulate production at scale for testing, but startups often just cross their fingers. Without intentional setup, staging vs. production parity becomes another custom challenge that can bite with unpredictable bugs in production.
- Security & Access Management: In theory, cloud IAM and tools provide fine control. In practice, each team needs to tailor roles, policies, and secret management to their workflow. Many end up with either overly permissive access (risky) or tangles of permission issues that slow down development – and often both. Secret management (API keys, credentials) is a notorious pain point. I’ve talked to teams where adding a new secret involved editing multiple files, Terraform configs, and a password manager, taking an engineer out of flow for far too long. And I am sure everyone reading this blog has seen that one time where someone committed a secret to github “accidentally”.
In short, the daily workflow of DevOps remains highly bespoke. The industry has produced a bevy of tools – Docker, Terraform, CI services, configuration managers – but integrating and maintaining them is left to each organization to figure out. Unlike spinning up an EC2 instance, which anyone can do in minutes, setting up a robust deployment pipeline or monitoring system can easily take experienced engineers weeks or months. It’s like each company is crafting its own plumbing system from raw copper pipes and fittings, even though 90% of all software products need the same basic things under the hood.
This gap has real consequences. Companies without streamlined DevOps processes ship less frequently, encounter more downtime, and often struggle with recovery after failures. In contrast, organizations that have optimized their DevOps workflows can release updates rapidly—often multiple times a day—allowing quicker feedback and adaptation. Studies repeatedly show that teams with effective automation, testing, and deployment pipelines achieve higher reliability and quicker recovery times. This efficiency isn't about writing code faster, but rather about systematically reducing friction between development and delivery, making them more responsive and stable in competitive markets.
So why aren’t more companies already using some kind of off-the-shelf “DevOps platform” to close this gap? In part because until recently, you either hired DevOps engineers to build your pipeline or you considered fully-managed hosting platforms (which often meant sacrificing flexibility or cost control). Many CTOs have felt that truly productizing DevOps – making it as turnkey as provisioning servers – was impossible without giving up control of their architecture. But that trade-off is starting to disappear, and forward-thinking teams are realizing that DevOps can be both standardized and tailored.
Commoditization is the inevitable endgame
This is a pattern we’ve seen before:
- Compute got abstracted with EC2, Fargate, and Lambda.
- Storage got abstracted with S3 and managed DBs.
- Even full-stack dev got abstracted with low-code tools.
Now it’s DevOps’ turn.
In a world where AI accelerates product development, where small teams ship faster than enterprises, DevOps needs to be a product—not a function.
If DevOps is the new plumbing, how do we make sure every company has great plumbing without needing a master plumber on staff for months? The answer is to productize and commoditize the DevOps process itself. In practice, this means adopting tools or platforms that package the best practices and common automation in a reusable way – so you configure a few high-level settings and poof: you have a working pipeline, monitoring dashboard, and scalable infrastructure.
We already see this movement in the rise of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and “DevOps automation” products. These solutions aim to give you the experience of a fully staffed DevOps team via software. CI/CD, Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions, logging, alerting, secrets management, autoscaling policies, deployment pipelines, RBAC, you name it – and it is available in a standardized, integrated way in these products. It’s not a black box SaaS that hosts your app for you (which could limit flexibility); rather, it’s like getting a prefabricated infrastructure delivered to your cloud, customizable but ready-made. This approach brings the world-class DevOps experience of big tech companies (which spend years and fortunes on internal platforms) to startups who can’t afford that investment on their own.
Commoditization brings the benefit of economies of scale. When multiple teams use a platform, the cost of building robust automation, best practices, and intelligent defaults can be spread out.
Commoditizing DevOps doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all in a bad way – you still tailor the architecture to your needs – but it means nobody has to build the common components from scratch again. Just as you wouldn’t manufacture your own servers, why hand-craft your CI system or monitoring stack if a proven blueprint is available? By leveraging a commoditized solution, you benefit from the collective best practices learned across many deployments. (For example, built-in rollbacks when common common errors are observed, or integrated cost analytics that alert you to a runaway cloud resource – these are things a good platform can provide out of the box, saving you expensive lessons.)
Another advantage is consistency. When DevOps is treated as code and managed by a platform, every environment (dev, staging, prod) can be made to conform. Consistency reduces those “it works here but not there” problems and makes onboarding new engineers simpler (they don’t have to decipher a bespoke web of scripts – they have a clear UI to work with).
Conclusion: Focus on Building, Not Plumbing. Empower Developer Self-Service
The evolution of cloud computing over the past two decades has given us incredible capabilities at our fingertips – yet it has also made the job of integrating those capabilities increasingly complex. Compute and storage have become utilities we scarcely think about (until the bill comes); now it’s time for the delivery and operations of software to reach that same level of ubiquity and ease.
DevOps is the new plumbing in the sense that it underpins everything, and it’s best when you don’t have to think about it – it just works. When you turn the faucet, water comes out. When you push code, a robust pipeline takes it to production safely. If there’s a leak, you have sensors (monitoring) to alert you and shut-off valves (automation rollbacks) to minimize damage.
For CTOs and startup founders, the message is clear: treat DevOps as a first-class priority, not a back-office chore. This doesn’t mean you must divert all your devs to infrastructure work. It means you should strongly consider leveraging the growing ecosystem of DevOps automation and platforms to give your team the power of a Silicon Valley-sized platform engineering group from day one. The cost is trivial compared to a serious outage, a security breach, or months of lost time building internal tools. And the reward is faster iteration, smoother scaling, and the freedom to focus on your unique value proposition.
In the end, your customers won’t praise your CI pipeline or your Kubernetes config – they’ll praise your product’s features and reliability. DevOps is a means to that end. By commoditizing and outsourcing the heavy lifting of infrastructure setup and management, you free your developers to innovate. You wouldn’t build your own electricity generator to power your office; likewise, you don’t need to build a whole bespoke infrastructure stack to power your software. Let the plumbing be plumbing – standardized, sturdy, and handled by experts – so you can concentrate on the application flows that truly matter.
Real-World Outcomes: Faster, Cheaper, More Reliable
Treating DevOps as a core priority delivers measurable results for startups. For instance:
- Hakimo (AI security) reduced cloud costs by 40% in 40 days, improving stability by automating infrastructure management (Case Study).
- KoinX (crypto compliance) increased deployment frequency from ~30 to over 150 deployments per month, cutting issue resolution time from hours to minutes through built-in observability (Case Study).
- Blue Voice (emergency SaaS) achieved daily, error-free deployments and dramatically improved their time-to-market by automating DevOps, eliminating manual errors (Case Study).
- GrowthFactor (geospatial analytics) integrated a complete DevOps platform early, scaling their infrastructure seamlessly as their team grew 5x—without dedicated DevOps hires (Case Study).
- Headlamp (health tech) leveraged a DevOps platform to manage Kubernetes, allowing their engineering team to scale from 4 to 24 services effortlessly, saving significant DevOps effort and tooling costs (Case Study).
These case studies span different domains, but they all echo the same theme: when DevOps is commoditized and automated, teams move faster, spend less, and sleep better at night. It’s not about removing all complexity – it’s about abstracting it behind a reliable platform the way compute and storage got abstracted. But, you still have ultimate control over how you arrange your architecture.
In the near future, startups that insist on hand-crafting their entire DevOps stack will be as antiquated as those hand-coding assembly – outpaced by those who leverage higher-level abstractions. The industry is moving toward commoditizing the last mile of software delivery. Embrace it, and you’ll deliver better software faster, with fewer headaches. DevOps as a commodity means your startup’s innovation can flow unimpeded, like water through well-laid pipes – and that is a competitive advantage you can’t afford to pass up.
