DevOps

Just a quick note on what DevOps means to me. At heart I think it's two things:

1. Developers need to take responsibility for what happens in production. This goes across definition of done (devs need to make sure the appropriate automated checks are in place so that the team will know both when it's not working and, as far as possible, why it's not working) and also across support; developers should be on support, feeling the pain of poor operational performance and monitoring.
2. Operations work needs to be automated. Ideally nothing should ever be changed manually in production; everything should be done by an automated process that runs against multiple environments with an automated build, check & deploy process fast enough to use to deploy a fix when production's on fire.
   Automation is a form of development, and consequently requires the same disciplines and skills as any other development; automation code needs to be as well factored and well tested as any other form of code.
   

In other words, a lot of ops work is development and developers need to be doing ops work. Which does not mean there is no room for specialisation; but like a US undergraduate degree your ops major should have a minor in dev and your dev major should have a minor in ops. In addition they should be on the same team, working together (hopefully pairing) to bring both their specialities to bear on the problem of making the product work seamlessly in production.