r/devops: rules, karma requirements and posting culture
A half-million practitioners talking shop about infrastructure, CI/CD and on-call life. Text-first, skeptical of vendors, and hard on new accounts.
Everything DevOps · Open on Reddit
- Members
- 516k
- Created
- 2010
- New posts a day
- 25.3
- Comments on a typical post
- 17
- New posts removed
- 53%
The short answer
r/devops has no published karma number, but AutoModerator blocks posts from accounts that are new to the subreddit and tells you to join the discussion first. Almost every post is a text post with a flair, about half of new posts never make it past Reddit's filters or the mods, and anything that reads like a vendor pitch is removed. Comment for a few weeks before you post, and bring a real question or a real war story.
Who posts here
Most threads assume you already run production systems. People drop Terraform, Kubernetes and CI/CD terms without explaining them, and a question you could answer with a search gets told so. Career threads from juniors are tolerated, but the technical floor is a working engineer.
- Platform engineers, SREs and sysadmins with several years in the job.
- Engineering managers and tech leads comparing how other teams are set up.
- Juniors and career changers, mostly in the career threads rather than the technical ones.
- Vendors and founders doing market research, who are expected to say so in the flair.
Karma and account requirements
What it takes to get a post through in r/devops.
| Karma | No number is published. You need a history of commenting in r/devops before your first post will go through.Mods' wording: “You must participate in the subreddit discussions before posting.” |
|---|---|
| Account age | Brand new accounts cannot post. AutoModerator removes the post or holds it for manual review, and says approvals will not be considered.Mods' wording: “Posts from brand new accounts to the subreddit are forbidden.” |
| Post flair | Expected. 99% of recent posts carry one. Discussion is the default; there are dedicated flairs for Tools, Vendor / market research and AI content. |
| Links | A bare link is not enough. Article posts need a short submission statement, the original title, and no URL shorteners.Mods' wording: “All articles will require a short submission statement of 3-5 sentences.” |
| Title filters | Titles containing "cake day", "breaking" or "petition" are removed automatically.Mods' wording: “do not allow posts containing "cake day", "breaking", or "petition" in the title” |
What AutoModerator says
The moderators' bot leaves these messages on posts. They are the closest thing to an official statement of the thresholds.
Posts from brand new accounts to the subreddit are forbidden. Take time to look around and get familiar with the community. You must participate in the subreddit discussions before posting. This is to prevent spam. Post approvals will not be considered.
Posts from new accounts require manual review
Unfortunately this post has been removed. /r/DevOps and reddit do not allow posts containing "cake day", "breaking", or "petition" in the title. Thank you!
What you can post
| Post type | Subreddit setting | Share of recent posts |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Allowed | 87% |
| Link | Allowed | 5% |
| Image | Allowed | 8% |
| Video | Not allowed | 0% |
| Poll | Allowed | 0% |
Post flairs in use
- Discussion 60%
- Tools 10%
- Ops / Incidents 7%
- Vendor / market research 6%
- Security 4%
- Architecture 4%
- Troubleshooting 3%
- Observability 3%
- AI content 3%
What happens to a new post
Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.
- Stayed up46%
- Removed by Reddit's filters48%
- Held by AutoModerator1%
- Removed by moderators4%
- Deleted by the author2%
Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.
What happened when we posted here
We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.
- Stayed up
- 93%
- Removed by Reddit's filters
- 5%
- Removed by moderators
- 2%
- Period
- August 2025 to August 2026
The rules, in the mods' words
- 1
Submissions must include discussion information
Can't be just a link, but also commentary about a link.
- 2
No editorialized titles
Exact titles of articles should be used to avoid confusion or mislead people.
- 3
Job postings go to /r/devopsjobs
This subreddit is for news and discussion.
- 4
No vendor spam
Although we won't mind you promoting projects you're part of, if this is your sole purpose in this reddit we don't want any of it. Consider buying advertisements if you want to promote your project or products.
- 5
No shortened URLs
There's no reason to have a level of indirection here. They could also change/disappear in the future.
- 6
No personal info
This is a site-wide rule.
- 7
Be excellent to eachother
Heated discussions are fine, personal attacks are not.
These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.
The culture
r/devops is a working practitioners' room. The people answering are platform engineers, SREs and sysadmins who run production systems, and they read every post with one question in mind: is this person here to talk shop, or to sell me something? Posts that pass that test get long, specific, opinionated replies. Posts that fail it get removed or picked apart.
The dominant format is a text post asking how other teams handle something: a second cloud provider, self-service infrastructure, permissions for AI agents. More than half of titles are questions. Career threads are the other staple, from CV roasts to whether the job market is bad or it is just you. The posts that travel furthest tend to be funny or painful observations from real operations, like a certificate about to expire at a company that should know better.
AI is the live fault line. There is a dedicated AI content flair, and "I built an AI incident responder" posts are among the most commonly removed. The community will discuss what AI is doing to their work all day. It has little patience for being the launch audience for another agent.
What lands
- Specific operational stories with a lesson, such as a missing TCP flag that quietly ate database throughput.
- Open questions that ask how other teams actually do something, with your own setup and constraints stated up front.
- Career questions with real numbers: years of experience, stack, what you have tried.
- Dry humor about the industry. The top recent post is a joke about a big company's SSL certificate expiring.
What gets removed or ignored
- "I built" tool announcements, especially AI ones, even when the tool is free or open source.
- Posts whose question is a thin wrapper around a product, including resource collections with a link at the end.
- First posts from accounts with no comment history in the subreddit.
- Job postings, which belong in r/devopsjobs.
The unwritten rules
- Use the Vendor / market research flair if you are a vendor or doing research. Posting the same thing under Discussion reads as hiding it, and the comments will say so.
- Name your stack. A question without the cloud, the orchestrator and the team size gets "it depends" and nothing else.
- Expect blunt answers. Senior people here will tell you the thing you are asking about is basic knowledge, and that is considered helpful.
- Comments are short, around 24 words, and rarely carry links. A comment with a link to your own product stands out immediately.
Self-promotion
The rule says the mods do not mind you promoting projects you are part of, as long as it is not your sole purpose in the subreddit, and that vendors should buy an ad instead. In practice the bar is higher than the wording. Launch posts are removed routinely, and the tolerated path is to be a known commenter first, flair the post honestly, and write it as a discussion that would still be worth reading with the product name deleted.
How people write here
- Typical post length
- 116 words
- Typical title length
- 11 words
- Titles phrased as a question
- 56%
- Typical comment length
- 28 words
- Comments that include a link
- 7%
- Posts that carry a flair
- 99%
When people post
- 0:00 UTC, 13
- 1:00 UTC, 12
- 2:00 UTC, 7
- 3:00 UTC, 6
- 4:00 UTC, 20
- 5:00 UTC, 12
- 6:00 UTC, 21
- 7:00 UTC, 21
- 8:00 UTC, 18
- 9:00 UTC, 25
- 10:00 UTC, 14
- 11:00 UTC, 16
- 12:00 UTC, 17
- 13:00 UTC, 24
- 14:00 UTC, 23
- 15:00 UTC, 15
- 16:00 UTC, 29
- 17:00 UTC, 29
- 18:00 UTC, 20
- 19:00 UTC, 19
- 20:00 UTC, 10
- 21:00 UTC, 12
- 22:00 UTC, 8
- 23:00 UTC, 9
New posts by hour of day, UTC.
Top keywords
The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/devops.
- devops 72 posts
- engineer 33 posts
- ci cd 21 posts
- kubernetes 20 posts
- devops engineer 13 posts
- cloud 30 posts
- terraform 16 posts
- docker 18 posts
- aws 23 posts
- infrastructure 23 posts
- sre 15 posts
- learning 23 posts
- github 18 posts
- jenkins 8 posts
- deployments 11 posts
- cluster 11 posts
- learn devops 5 posts
- devops role 5 posts
- architecture 16 posts
- github actions 9 posts
- git 12 posts
- production 19 posts
- azure 11 posts
- teams 20 posts
- pipelines 11 posts
- gitlab 8 posts
- job 31 posts
- learn 20 posts
- platform 22 posts
- environments 11 posts
- devops sre 7 posts
- deployment 11 posts
- logs 13 posts
- engineering 17 posts
- linux 11 posts
- secrets 9 posts
- developer 15 posts
- helm 6 posts
- handle 20 posts
- code 25 posts
Recurring topics: devops, ai, aws, looking for, cloud, api, tool, code, tools, terraform.
Growth
- 2012644
- 20132k
- 20145.8k
- 201511k
- 201619k
- 201734k
- 201870k
- 2019128k
- 2020175k
- 2021215k
- 2023296k
- 2024366k
- 2025455k
- 2026516k
Related subreddits
- r/coding
- r/Backend
- r/sre
- r/aiagents
- r/programming
- r/cursor
- r/netsecstudents
- r/devsecops
- r/gitlab
- r/rust
Common questions
How much karma do you need to post in r/devops?
The moderators do not publish a number. AutoModerator removes posts from accounts that are new to the subreddit and tells them to participate in discussions first, so the working requirement is an established account with comment history in r/devops itself.
Can I promote my tool in r/devops?
Only as a small part of real participation. The rules ban vendor spam and suggest buying an ad. Tool launch posts, particularly AI tools, are among the most frequently removed posts. If you do post, use the Vendor / market research or Tools flair and lead with the problem, not the product.
What kind of posts work in r/devops?
Text posts. About 87% of recent posts that stayed up are text, and most are tagged Discussion. Questions about how other teams handle a problem, production war stories and career threads get the most replies.
Why was my r/devops post removed?
The common causes are a new account with no history in the subreddit, a post that reads as promotion, a job listing, or a title that trips an automatic filter. Roughly half of new posts in our sample were removed, most of them by Reddit's own spam filters before a moderator saw them.
Data as of October 4, 2026. Numbers come from public Reddit data (the Arctic Shift archive and GummySearch) sampled on this date. Removal share counts posts taken down by moderators, AutoModerator or Reddit's own filters. Banner and icon belong to the community. Moderators change rules without notice, so treat the sidebar as the final word.
