“You build it, you run it” has been my mantra for many years now. A number of times I was approached by management and they asked who should be operating stuff that I had built. Because, allegedly, my time was too precious for doing such a mundane task like operations.

This is to all managers: Operations is neither mundane nor something for junior staff. It is in fact exactly the opposite. Operations is what keeps the organization alive. Operations is where the best people should be, because here the rubber (the developed software) hits the road. Operations is your last line of defense, when (not if) something goes catastrophically wrong. Operations is a key influencing factor on your organization’s ROI. Operations determines your ability to be agile on the market. Operations is key for customer satisfaction. I could go on and on, but likely you long got my point.

Of course there are some aspects to operations that, when things are done the wrong way, are repetitive and far from challenging. But that should mostly be behind us. Yes, in the 1960s we had people who did nothing but enter data. And until not too long ago a lot of operations was just ticking off check boxes on a to-do list. But with things like infrastructure as code (see my recent post on starting with Chef Infra Server), this should really be something from the past. What you need today are people who take pride in running a lean, highly automated, highly resilient IT organization.

And that is where it should be clear to everybody, that DevOps is much more about organization, knowledge, and collaboration beyond traditional “borders”, than about technology.

By the way: My response to management about who should run my stuff, has always been “me”. Because the applications were built to be as maintenance-free as possible. Only the occasional support ticket had to be answered and with proper logging/auditing that is nothing that takes a lot of time. And fixing the occasional bug was not a big deal either, thanks to Clean Code and test-automation.

This allowed me to support 6 business-critical applications as a “side-project”, i.e. no time was officially allocated. Comparable applications operated by other departments had at least three people full-time for support only.