I've found that there is a mindset out there that ops should be the sole responsibility of developers. They wrote the code, they should own the running of the service. This mindset falls down on two key reasons:
1) Not all developers are good at ops. Issues aren't always related to the code. Platform choices come into play and all the characteristics of a particular platform aren't necessarily known to developers.
2) In companies where developers are pushed hard -- It's a startup!, We must deliver! (the typical death march) -- after 60+ hour weeks, one's trouble shooting skills aren't the best.
In the last 3-4 startups I've been involved with, I've been one of a small handful of people who can do ops as well as code (across a myriad of technologies) and have pushed for engineering to provide as much logging, documentation, and guidance to ops when the company deems them relevant; when ops is considered part of dev, I pushed for getting some basic ops in house (the two instances I can think of were the 'weekends are in the schedule' type startups).
well said.. I'm an ops guy that likes working with small companies and I've come into a lot of startups where dev did the ops and it was a mess. No one knew if backups work, monitoring was a mess at best and the way things were setup, nothing would scale at all
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I've found that there is a mindset out there that ops should be the sole responsibility of developers. They wrote the code, they should own the running of the service. This mindset falls down on two key reasons:
1) Not all developers are good at ops. Issues aren't always related to the code. Platform choices come into play and all the characteristics of a particular platform aren't necessarily known to developers.
2) In companies where developers are pushed hard -- It's a startup!, We must deliver! (the typical death march) -- after 60+ hour weeks, one's trouble shooting skills aren't the best.
In the last 3-4 startups I've been involved with, I've been one of a small handful of people who can do ops as well as code (across a myriad of technologies) and have pushed for engineering to provide as much logging, documentation, and guidance to ops when the company deems them relevant; when ops is considered part of dev, I pushed for getting some basic ops in house (the two instances I can think of were the 'weekends are in the schedule' type startups).
well said.. I'm an ops guy that likes working with small companies and I've come into a lot of startups where dev did the ops and it was a mess. No one knew if backups work, monitoring was a mess at best and the way things were setup, nothing would scale at all