Can DevOps overcome us-vs-them

I find it interesting that  Andi Mann’s Myopic View of DevOps Misses the Mark is fairly dismissive  of DevOps because developers “create messes” for operations to clean up.  However, many of the responses and defenses of DevOps are laden with some sharp comments about “slow moving” operations groups (e.g. Perhaps DevOps Misnamed?).  Clearly the us-vs-them wall between Ops-thinking and Dev-thinking is still standing strong — but I’m still hopeful for that wall coming down.

For me, what is really exciting about DevOps is the notion that software development, infrastructure engineering and operational automation can and should done simultaneously and collaboratively.  DevOps doesn’t invalidate ITIL, nor does it mean unbridled application deployment.

The way I see it we already have some great examples of DevOps in action — its just that the term hasn’t been applied to them yet.  One of my particular favorites is a presentation by Challenges and Lessons from Growing an e-Commerce Platform to Planet Scale Randy Shoup, eBay. Why? Because the architectural lessons reek of operations knowledge. I think most operations staff would love it if their architects and developers truly understood why it is important to minimize service topology dependencies (Lesson 7) and to have an authoritative system of record (Lesson 8).   I also think most developers would love it if their operations teams truly understood how to explain the impact of deployment and infrastructure configuration choices in application performance terms.

I’m also beginning to hear from enterprises who have seen enormous productivity gains for BOTH development and operations teams when this sort of collaboration happens — and when development and operations solutions interact in meaningful ways.  By enormous I mean a month shaved off of an application development project and slashing the number of rollbacks from live operations.

I’m looking forward to the day I get the green light to publish some of these stories.  Because like any other IT trend, DevOps will only overcome us-vs-them thinking when businesses can clearly see the benefits and the path to value.