Ship It Interviews: The WHY Behind DevOps, Upskilling, and Agentic AI (with Maz Islam)

This is a Ship It Weekly interview episode. The weekly news recaps are still weekly. These interviews drop in between when I find someone worth talking to and the convo feels useful.

In this episode I’m joined by Mazharul “Maz” Islam (DevOps with Maz). Maz is a UK-based DevOps Engineer who shares practical, real-world DevOps content on YouTube and LinkedIn. We talk about the stuff that actually matters when you’re building systems, running infrastructure, owning reliability, and living in on-call.

We hit three big things: the importance of understanding the WHY behind DevOps (not just the tools), how to upskill and keep up with the industry without burning out, and what the agentic AI era might look like for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams. We also touch on MCPs and AI agents, and what “leveling up” looks like for companies that want to move faster without breaking everything.

If you’re into DevOps culture, SRE practices, platform engineering, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and how teams should think about reliability and security as things keep changing, this one should land.

Guest Mazharul Islam (DevOps with Maz) UK-based DevOps Engineer. Posts a lot of hands-on content around cloud, DevOps fundamentals, and leveling up as an engineer.

Links (Maz) YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/@devopswithmaz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mazharul419

Topics we covered WHY behind DevOps, and why “tools” is the smallest part of it DevOps fundamentals vs tool-chasing Upskilling strategies for DevOps Engineers and SREs How to keep learning cloud and automation without drowning What strong teams measure and what “good” actually looks like (delivery, reliability, feedback loops) Agentic AI, AI agents in operations, and the next era of DevOps MCPs, automation guardrails, and safe ways to scale change How companies can “level up” their engineering org without turning it into chaos

Book Maz recommended The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations (Paperback, Oct 6, 2016) Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis

About Ship It Weekly (format) Ship It Weekly is for people running infrastructure and owning reliability. Most episodes are quick weekly news recaps for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. In between those weekly drops, I’ll publish interview episodes like this one.

Subscribe / help the show If you want the weekly DevOps news recaps plus these interviews, hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app. And if you’re feeling generous, leave a rating or review and share this episode with a coworker (especially your on-call buddy). That stuff genuinely helps the show get discovered.