As the year winds down and everyone heads for turkey, stuffing, and a well-earned nap, the internet doesn’t exactly take a holiday. Deployments still lurk in pull requests, alerts still wait in the wings, and someone is always on call with a laptop on the kitchen counter. This light-hearted poem is a little thank-you—and a knowing wink—to the engineers, sysadmins, and SREs who keep sites running smoothly from Thanksgiving dinner straight through Cyber Monday.
A DevOps Thanksgiving
I.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving,
the CTO softly says,
“Let’s freeze all non-critical changes
so we’re not on Slack all day.”
II.
The devs all nod in solemn
yet suspicious, quiet delight,
then push “one last tiny hotfix”
right before they say goodnight.
III.
The pipelines start their gobbling,
Jenkins turkeys spin and cluck,
one job fails on npm ci
and everyone just mutters, “Yup.”
IV.
On Thursday, plates are loaded,
DNS is out of mind,
’til someone’s phone starts buzzing
with a 5xx alert this time.
V.
The on-call engineer goes pale,
drops the gravy, grabs the lid,
“Who deployed to main on Thursday?
Tell me now — which one of you did?”
VI.
In a flurry of VPN logins
and half-remembered sudo tricks,
they rollback with mashed-potato fingers
and a side of quick kubectl fix.
VII.
The logs read like a novel:
timeouts, cache misses, and tears.
Somewhere a lonely cron job
has been running twice for years.
VIII.
By Friday the sales team is cheering,
“Black Friday traffic looks great!”
Meanwhile Redis is quietly wheezing,
and the DB is flirting with fate.
IX.
Then comes the main event looming—
Cyber Monday’s shining crown,
marketing’s promised “guaranteed uptime”
like it’s something that can’t fall down.
X.
Auto-scaling’s set to “maybe,”
rate limits at “we’ll see,”
the runbook says, “If it all catches fire,
try turning it off and back on gracefully.”
XI.
But this time the graphs stay boring,
just gentle bumps in the night,
because someone tested the failover
and tuned the queries just right.
XII.
So here’s to the quiet heroes,
who keep the websites fast and warm,
from YAML wranglers to DNS tamers,
and the ones who babysit Terraform.
XIII.
May your turkeys stay unburned,
your SSL certs never expire,
your deploys be small and reversible,
and your pagers mostly silent and quiet.
XIV.
And when the holiday dust has settled
and the dashboards fade from view,
may your servers be truly “thankful”
for having ops and devs like you.
