Long time SRE/DevOps person here:
Even pre-AI, I or other team member could have written our own versions of:
- JIRA
- Prometheus
- etc
but we didn't.
Why not? A couple reasons:
- Why write custom software for common problems that lots of other people have? We are already helping build internal custom systems for the business
- We were already supporting internal apps and now we have to support more apps? Apps that have dedicated support teams that are cheaper than us supporting them due to economies of scale/
You might say that AI changes the economics of the above to which I respond:
the marginal cost of a vendor adding another cloud instance of their existing software is, while non-zero, MUCH cheaper for them than for us. They also handle all of the security, patching, stability etc.
Yes, AI changes the absolute prices of this work but it doesn't necessarily change the relative pricing dynamics which are effectively the same.
Even pre-AI, I or other team member could have written our own versions of:
- JIRA
- Prometheus
- etc
but we didn't.
Why not? A couple reasons:
- Why write custom software for common problems that lots of other people have? We are already helping build internal custom systems for the business
- We were already supporting internal apps and now we have to support more apps? Apps that have dedicated support teams that are cheaper than us supporting them due to economies of scale/
You might say that AI changes the economics of the above to which I respond:
the marginal cost of a vendor adding another cloud instance of their existing software is, while non-zero, MUCH cheaper for them than for us. They also handle all of the security, patching, stability etc.
Yes, AI changes the absolute prices of this work but it doesn't necessarily change the relative pricing dynamics which are effectively the same.