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Many IT teams that struggle with delivery already have the tools they need. The harder problem is that nobody can say, with confidence, where a developer’s responsibility ends, where an operator’s begins, and who is accountable for the platform in between. Richard Kovacs, who identifies himself as CTO of HariKube, argues in a DEV Community article titled “It’s Not a Technology Shortage. It’s a Boundary Shortage” that this ambiguity, rather than missing technology, drives repeated and wasteful work. He also proposes a remedy: a machine-verifiable contract that separates what a team intends from how that intent is carried out.
The core claim: unclear boundaries, not missing tools
Kovacs’s central argument is that an organisation can have plenty of technology and still stall because responsibility is poorly defined. In his account, the symptom is duplication. When roles overlap and nobody has a clear mandate, each team tends to solve the same integration problem in its own way. The result is many local solutions that do not fit together, and a growing burden of coordination.
The article frames this as a question of ownership: who owns what between developers, operators and the platform team. That framing is the author’s position, presented in a first-person essay rather than backed by a measured study. It is worth reading as a diagnosis to test against your own organisation, not as a finding that applies to every team.
Where the boundary breaks down
The article describes three overlaps that it treats as typical of how responsibility leaks across roles.
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Developers operating infrastructure
When application teams must configure runtime resources, networking or deployment details themselves, they take on operational concerns that they may not be equipped or mandated to own. The developer ends up acting as an operator without the authority or context that role normally carries.
Operators fixing application-specific logic
The reverse happens when operators are pulled into application behaviour, such as adjusting how a service handles a particular condition. Operators then become de facto co-authors of application code they did not write and may not fully understand.
Platform teams running products and support
Platform teams are often asked to build an internal product for other teams while also handling their support tickets. The article suggests that this double role squeezes out the design work that would prevent the repeated problems in the first place.
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The proposed fix: a contract among three parties
The remedy the article proposes is a declarative contract with three distinct statements. Each one assigns a responsibility to a different party.
- The developer declares intent. In the article’s words, “The developer declares what they want.”
- The operator sets conditions. As the article puts it, “The operator defines under what conditions it may happen.”
- The platform validates, records and materializes. The article states, “The platform validates, records, and consistently materializes the intent.”
Kovacs summarises the goal this way: “The goal is that the developer can develop, the operator can operate, and there is a clear, machine-verifiable contract between them.” The claim is that each party can change its own part of the system without forcing the others to co-author every decision. A developer does not have to become an operator, and an operator does not have to review every application change to keep the arrangement working.
The article calls this model a contract that HariKube is built around. Readers should treat that as the author’s design description. The essay does not show a running implementation of it.
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What “a transaction” means in this model
One distinction in the article is easy to miss and matters for how the model would be used. Kovacs writes: “A transaction does not mean that every necessary step has already been completed; it means that the parties’ shared intent has been validated and durably recorded.”
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In other words, the platform’s commitment is to record and validate agreed intent, not to guarantee that every downstream action has finished. Teams adopting this kind of pattern would need to design their own tracking for execution, because a recorded intent and a completed deployment are different states.
The platform primitives the author names
To make the contract work, the article identifies six capabilities that the platform would need to provide. These are the building blocks the author considers reusable across teams:
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- State management
- Validation
- Authorization
- Consistency models
- Auditability
- Event propagation
Putting these in the platform, rather than rebuilding them in each team, is the mechanism by which the article expects duplicated work to fall away.
What the source does and does not establish
The DEV Community post is dated 27 September, but the year is not shown on the page as it appears, so readers should not assume a particular publication year from the text alone. The author profile identifies Kovacs as HariKube’s CTO and notes a DevOps background.
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- It does not provide statistics that measure the scale of the boundary problem or the impact of the proposed model.
- It does not compare two implemented options with measured results.
- It does not establish whether HariKube is currently available, what its present capabilities are, or whether it is in production use.
- It does not describe partner or commercial terms for HariKube.
Anyone deciding whether to adopt the approach should verify those points directly with the project before relying on them.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Testing the boundary question in your own team
The article’s most useful contribution is the question it puts to a team, which is independent of any product. The following steps apply that question without assuming the proposed platform exists.
- List every recurring change that reaches production, such as runtime configuration, application logic, and scaling rules.
- For each change, name the one role that declares the intent and the one role that sets the conditions under which it may proceed.
- Identify which role currently performs the work that the other role should own, and note how often it happens.
- Check whether the same integration or validation logic is rebuilt by more than one team. Those repeats are the candidates for a shared platform capability.
- Decide where the record of agreed intent lives, and how you will tell a recorded change apart from a completed one.
The table below turns the article’s framework into criteria for comparing options. These are analytical questions drawn from the essay, not measured results.
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|---|---|---|
| Responsibility clarity | Can each role state what it owns without consulting the others? | Overlapping ownership is the article’s stated root cause. |
| Explicit intent and conditions | Are developer intent and operator conditions written down in a form the platform can check? | The contract depends on both being represented, not implied. |
| Shared validation and audit | Are validation and audit records provided once by the platform, or rebuilt per team? | The article lists them among reusable primitives. |
| Repeated integration work | How much integration logic does each team maintain itself? | The author links duplication to team-by-team solutions. |
For further reading on the source, see the original post: It’s Not a Technology Shortage. It’s a Boundary Shortage on DEV Community.
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