DevOps - A Valentine's Day Fairy Tale

I worked at Amazon for two years - a company where all devs are also ops.

I ran screaming away and swore never again.

Nothing quite achieves the warm fuzzy feeling after a grueling 10-hour dev deathmarch and then getting woken up at 5am by your pager. Nothing quite inspires confidence than week after week of major ops priorities getting sidelined in favor of feature development, resulting in even more late-night firefighting, resulting in groggy, angry engineers in the mornings.

Dev and ops should frequently sit at the same table. They should not be one and the same. I'm not sure what flavor the blog is promoting - I've seen people proselytize for both. DevOps seems to be used interchangeably between "all devs are ops" and "devs work with ops", which in my mind are very very different concepts.

DevOps is a very real concept. I think it started with small teams in small companies and has spread via agile development methodolgies into larger businesses. One of my developers once described a good developer as a swiss army knife of IT skills. I think that is very true.

Do we really have to make up stories and cool new names like DevOps to get the coders to talk to the server admins?

I guess we do, I guess we do...

Well written - I sent this article to my team (devs and business analysts) to hopefully inspire them to play more nicely!