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?

TLDR provided by ChatGPT:

As software development grows more complex, the devops approach, which merges software development and IT operations roles, is under scrutiny. Although devops has sped up updates and tightened feedback loops, it’s often overburdening individuals by blurring developer and operator roles. Developers have voiced reluctance to handle operations, citing the specialized skills needed. The potential solutions include realigning responsibilities to empower developers with timely information, using container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes to separate developer and operator concerns, and expanding the roles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and platform engineering. The future of software development may require a blend of devops, SRE, and platform engineering to effectively address the growing complexity.

  • Tonka TruckEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    From the article:

    “Where it doesn’t work well is by asking developers to do all of that work without centralized expertise and tooling support.”

    IMO, developers should be given enough enough to get themselves in trouble. However there’s a team that owns and enables those processes.

    I’ve always thought of it like a team who owns an API. That API team owns the api, but if another team wants to use said API, cool, here’s some documentation for it (env configs, OAuth2.0 onboarding, distrolist, future features, etc.). Maybe, depending on the company, there’s a little more “ceremony” around how much the new team will be using the API just from a load perspective. But overall a team is allowed to digest the API with some guidance.

    IMO, this is what should be happening with DevOps/DevSecOps/Operations. They enable the developers to follow some general cookie cutter guidelines with the ability to request adjustments. However, the permutations in what a person can do in operations are so much higher than just a well defined API service.

    In my own career, I’ve found that “ace in my back pocket” is being able to handle a lot of my team’s DevOps and general automation of tasks. But when I’ve coached and mentored folks usually there’s a somewhat clear split between the developers who are interested in learning DevOps and those who just want to stay feature-devs.