2026-02-03, 15:15–15:40, D.Aud
Day One operations focus on initial deployment, provisioning resources, and achieving operational state. Day Two operations encompass ongoing lifecycle management: updates, drift correction, decommissioning, and sustained operational health.
The evolution from Puppet and Chef to Ansible, Terraform, Pulumi, and platforms like Crossplane represents decades of innovation in infrastructure automation. Each generation has advanced deployment capabilities, yet consistent patterns emerge in post-deployment operational challenges.
This talk explores the intricate transition from deployment to sustained operations, a journey marked by recurring themes in the evolution of configuration management. We'll dissect how different approaches handle this transition, exploring operational challenges across infrastructure layers from bare metal through hypervisors to cloud platforms.
Through comprehensive historical analysis, we'll delve into questions such as: Why do similar operational challenges persist across different generations of tooling? How do state management approaches compare to distributed coordination systems? What can we learn from examining infrastructure as dynamic systems rather than static code?
Additionally, we'll explore the relationship between infrastructure automation tools and observability platforms, investigating how the separation between these domains affects operational visibility and decision-making during Day Two operations.
You'll gain insights into approaches to infrastructure management that address the complete operational lifecycle, leaving you prepared to tackle the challenges ahead.
Day One operations focus on initial deployment, while Day Two covers everything that follows: updates, drift correction, and lifecycle management. You deploy perfectly with Terraform, everything shows green, then six months later, you discover a database running somewhere that nobody remembers creating, and no monitoring covers it.
After decades working with configuration management tools from Puppet to Terraform, through the rise of DevOps and platform engineering, I've watched each generation promise to be the next breakthrough while somehow repeating the same conceptual blind spots. During recent paternal leave, I had time to examine why similar patterns emerge across different tooling generations, how state management compares to distributed coordination systems, and why infrastructure automation remains disconnected from observability platforms.
This talk explores these recurring themes and what we can learn from them.
The database example is relatable - everyone's found mystery infrastructure running somewhere!
Yair Etziony is an Engineering Manager at AMBOSS with over 30 years of experience in systems administration, DevOps, and cloud technologies. He holds a BA in modern history and philosophy, organizes the Berlin DevOps meetup, and has spoken at DevOpsCon and DevOps Days Berlin. His career spans from VAX/VMS systems in the 1990s to modern cloud infrastructure, providing a unique historical perspective on technology evolution.