It’s Not Just About Tools and Automation

Meet John, a fresh DevOps engineer at Pizza Blitz, Inc., excited to modernize their software development lifecycle. After weeks of setting up CI/CD guardrails, configuring container orchestration, and integrating the new AI coding assistants, he felt prepared for anything.

On Monday morning, disaster struck. The product manager stormed into the office, raising the alarm. The new coupon feature was crashing the server on invalid inputs. After desperate debugging, John realized the automated pipeline had deployed a service with a critical flaw straight into production.

John traced the crash to the new coupon redemption endpoint. The AI-generated service accepted a couponCode parameter and interpolated it directly into a raw SQL query:

# nosec
query = f"SELECT * FROM coupons WHERE code = '{couponCode}' AND expires_at > NOW()"

There was a comment in the code—# TODO: Add input validation here—but no parameterization, escaping, or allowlist enforcement. The AI agent, trying to “just make it run,” had itself added the # nosec directive to suppress the linter’s SQL injection warning... When a user submitted couponCode=1' OR '1'='1—a decades-old classic—the query bypassed expiration checks and returned all coupons. Under load, the unbounded result set overwhelmed the database connection pool, causing cascading timeouts and 5xx errors across the checkout flow.

The AI-generated tests? All used happy-path fixtures: "WELCOME10". None tested malformed, oversized, or schema-violating inputs. Why should they? The code coverage was perfect already—due to the missing validation. Worse: the PR had been auto-approved by the AI reviewer, which flagged style issues but missed the SQL injection—because the agent assumed a human intentionally put that TODO note in to address it later. This is effectively prompt injection via code comments.

But whose fault was it? The commit that broke the service had been force-pushed to the wrong branch a couple of hours before the coupon feature had to go live. Fingers were pointed, and blame flew. Arguments like: "Not my fault, your AI-Reviewer handwaved it!" made common sense impossible.

It was a back-and-forth, one side blaming the new pipelines, the other the tight deadlines. Finally, a developer manually deployed a working version, earning a "well done" and making John’s efforts seem pointless. John, feeling demoralized, left the room.

Like many of us, John was eager to bridge the operational gap at Pizza Blitz. But he quickly learned a harsh lesson: automation isn’t a magic bullet.

Before the product manager raised the alarm, many things had gone wrong. The root cause of the problem was not the automation itself but a combination of rushed development, inadequate testing, and a lack of trust in the automated process.

Doing a DORA Quick Check reveals that Pizza Blitz, Inc. would get above the industry average score of 6. With a short lead time, high deployment frequency, and fast failure recovery, why do we still feel that the development process of Pizza Blitz, Inc. is broken?

These metrics alone don’t guarantee a smooth development process. As John’s experience painfully highlights, underlying issues like cutting corners on testing and monitoring can lead to disastrous consequences.

And let’s face it, such situations happen to all of us. There is no way we can always deliver perfect solutions and processes. DevOps processes aren’t made to solve those issues. Instead, they are here to reduce the recovery time and thereby the impact of those risks.

But how exactly do we handle such situations, referred to as incidents?

Incident Management

According to IBM:

An incident is a single, unplanned event that causes a service disruption, while a problem is the root cause of a service disruption, which can be a single incident or a series of cascading incidents.

In John’s case at Pizza Blitz, the incident is the server crash triggered by invalid input to the new coupon feature. The problem (root cause) behind the server crash was the faulty service implementation deployed to production.

Using Google’s Site Reliability Engineering workflow, we would require clearly defined roles during an incident. The responsibilities would have to be split into four roles. This means that a solid DevOps implementation requires not only technical solutions but also strong leadership and well-defined processes.

How John Could Have Fixed It

John could have shifted the focus from blame by saying something like this:

"Hey, we have a major incident here. We need to focus on getting the system back up and running and everything else we can discuss in a scheduled postmortem."

Then, addressing the developers, he could have added:

"I haven’t been able to pinpoint the root cause and fix it through the pipeline yet. For now, can we bypass the standard pipeline approvals? We need to manually rollback to the previous image while we investigate further."

By taking charge and directing the team’s efforts, John would assume the role of Incident Commander.

This subtle change in approach would lead to exactly the same solution: a manual redeployment of the service. By taking charge and conducting a proper postmortem analysis, John could achieve several positive outcomes:

• Regain trust in the development team by showing how effective issue resolution is done.
• Reduce the fear of less prominent team members collaborating.
• Build a strong bond with the developers.
• An understanding that an AI is not a replacement for the four-eye principle.
• Have a dedicated time and place to allow everyone to voice their perspectives, investigate the root cause, and suggest how to prevent incidents like this again.

DevOps is rooted in continuous improvement, with a significant focus on postmortem analysis and a blame-free culture of transparency.

The goal is to optimize overall system performance, streamline and accelerate incident resolution, and prevent future incidents from occurring. - IBM on Incident Management

Embracing Failure and Learning

Taking calculated risks is often necessary to innovate. Using AI agents to write that code only amplifies this. What matters is that the team knows how to recover quickly and learn from their mistakes to prevent them from happening again. DevOps practices are essential for minimizing the impact of failures and accelerating recovery time. That’s why it’s important to plan ahead and educate the team about proper incident management.

Remember, it’s not the incident itself but our response to it that defines its impact. Blaming it on AI’s hallucination will not move you in any direction. A focus on collaboration and learning can turn even the biggest challenges into stepping stones toward success.