Home Enews5-2 Devs don’t want to do ops

Devs don’t want to do ops

by Scott Carey

Developers are straining under the demands of ‘You build it, you run it,’ and operators are feeling more pressure too. Is it time for development and operations to be separated once again?

With the job of software development getting more and more complex, it could be time for dev and ops specialists to separate once again. But can that be done without repeating the mistakes of the past?

Devops emerged hand-in-hand with the rise of agile methodologies and cloud computing in the late 2000s, as software started to eat the world. A neat portmanteau of “development” and “operations,” devops sought to bring together the two previously separate groups responsible for building and deploying software. It also coincided with, or even inadvertently pushed forward, the need for software engineers to tighten their user feedback loops and push updates to production more frequently.

While many organizations grabbed this opportunity to bring together two sets of specialists to solve common problems at previously impossible speeds, others took the rise of devops as license for developers to take responsibility for operations tasks and sought to build a super team of semi-mythical full-stack developers.

[ Also on InfoWorld: In search of the devops ideal ]

“Devs don’t want to deal with operational concerns, for the most part,” tweeted Devops for Dummies author and head of community engagement at Amazon Web Services, Emily Freeman.

Freeman clearly hit a nerve, with hundreds of replies pouring in from developers who also did not want to do ops.

“I am a dev and I don’t want to deal with operation concerns,” Scott Pantall, a software engineer at the fast food company Chipotle, replied.

Devs and ops should work closely while having differentiated roles. The empathy between teams is the real point,” Andrew Gracey, a developer evangelist at SUSE, weighed in.

A ‘massive’ increase in responsibilities

While the stock of enterprise software developers has never been higher, the specialized expertise of technical operations has somewhat faded into the background, even as their workloads have increased.While the stock of enterprise software developers has never been higher, the specialized expertise of technical operations has somewhat faded into the background, even as their workloads have increased.

Recognizing the problem

The situation may not be as hopeless as Duggan and others believe, though it may require a significant realignment of engineering teams and their responsibilities.

“The intention is not to put the burden on the developer, it is to empower developers with the right information at the right time,” Harness’s Durkin said. “They don’t want to configure everything, but they do want the information from those systems at the right time to allow operations and security and infrastructure teams to work appropriately. Devs shouldn’t care unless something breaks.”

You may also like