TL;DR:
If it's stuff his company sells, it's NOT hyped at all, but really the bee's knees.
If it's stuff by somenone else, it's overhyped.
The DevOps market is not overhyped – except for container technology and other bits that are, the head of Puppet Labs told us last month. Depending on your point of view, the technologies of DevOps, Agile Continuous Delivery and digital transformation are worthy of slavish devotion, or are subject to egregious levels of hype …
"""DevOps, Agile, Continuous Delivery and digital transformation"""
I have come to the conclusion that those are as bad as the word "Cloud", sure there are a a few workflows where they make perfect sense, but overall it is just people wanking around with new words for concepts they poorly understand, and that have been well known since the 70s, that in itself is not bad, it has happened throughout the history of IT and it goes in phases, at some point it was known as reinventing the wheel but changing the name to "Circular framing"
What worries me is that it leads to what I call: "impossible jobs" where the amount of skills required are impossible to cover because they are unrealistic.
... it's Docker that is overhyped.
Most of the tools like cfengine, puppet and chef are useful for some people with very uniform and large infrastructure. But for a lot of people it is over complex nonsense. Most are using because it is fashionable. If you know what you are doing you can do much much more with some scripts and making custom packages with apt-get.
They are good for smaller environments too
The ability to spin up a server that looks & plays the same, first time every time is not to be underestimated
And the amount of work is not that evil either; A bit of a learning curve, but not too painful
Start with the easiest, parts, prove it to yourself, then start adding bits until you can burn down the OS and spin up a new one with having to manually twiddle bits to make it work.
That is the thing about decent config management there is not THAT much difference between an estate that has ~20 machines, ~200 machines or ~2000 machines
Consumer tech is different, but enterprise tech takes a lot of time to sell and is a different ball game. Selling stuff hype does not really work here, unless of course it has become a buzzword where the IT leaders must have them as the CEO is asking about it (in the elevator). The concepts leveraged by each and every single new-age technology company (born after 2000) have always been around. However, repackaging them in something more meaningful, something which is understood better, and is easier to consume is not a small task. Remember, there is limited core tech innovation these days its largely packaging and repackaging the earlier ideas due to the benefit of better virtualization and compute capacity.