Navigating the Vendor Landscape for Seamless DevOps Collaboration

Three years ago, I was the guy fielding angry calls at 3 AM because our monitoring service decided to take a nap during Black Friday. Two years ago, I watched my team burn through a weekend trying to get our new deployment tool to actually deploy something. Last year, I spent six months in vendor hell because nobody bothered to read the fine print on our cloud storage contract.
Yeah, I’ve made every mistake in the book when it comes to vendor management. And frankly, most DevOps teams are making the same mistakes I did. So here’s what I wish someone had told me back then.