DevOps, it turns out, is not dead. This is awkward for everyone who has already written the eulogy, ordered the wreaths, and booked the conference slot titled "What Comes After DevOps.”

In fact, DevOps was never the thing at all, but rather the deeply misunderstood journey towards the thing — a long, occasionally slippery climb in which humans attempted to persuade software systems to deliver value without requiring nightly sacrifices, heroic memory feats, or a particularly knowledgeable individual often, spookily, named Dave.

Platforms, far from being a fashionable replacement, were somewhat always the destination: carefully constructed habitats designed to prevent developers from having to hold the entire universe in their heads at once, allowing value to flow calmly from idea to production without screaming. Just like DevOps.

Along the way, we made the classic mistake of becoming certain. Certain that more tools meant more progress. Certain that optimisation was the same as improvement. Certain that if everything was faster, the system must be better — even when the bottleneck remained stubbornly unmoved, quietly sipping tea and watching us optimise everything else.

In this talk Russ Miles, Internal Developer Platforms at ClearBank, explains the relationship between the Princess Bride and his DevOps journey, gently dismantling the illusion of certainty, borrowing from constraint theory, cognitive science, and the occasional sword fight to argue that nothing dies faster than an idea trapped in false certainty. DevOps lives precisely where curiosity survives, platforms succeed only when they remain evidenced, and the true purpose of all this effort is revealed to be astonishingly simple: to let value flow, humans think, and systems remain just boring enough not to notice — which, as it turns out, is rather the point.