[Karunamon]

Where I get frustrated with ops is when they forget that they're in the service business. They're there to serve application developers in the same way that the application developers are there to serve customers.

In my view, you've got that completely backwards. Both departments serve customers in a roundabout way. Dev is responsible for turning user stories (generated either by other devs, focus groups, and so forth - which may, but doesn't necessarily involve an actual paying customer) into code, ops is responsible for keeping that code running.

If dev screws up, user gets bugs, or the app goes down. Same for ops - it's just the class of bugs are different.

Application developers are telling you they want the kind of functionality that Docker offers. That makes it your job to figure out how that happens, not if it happens.

As long as me and my ops team are the primary people with skin in the game (read: getting 3AM wakeup calls), me and my team will maintain a say in what tech stack we're responsible for the care and feeding of. The dark days of dev throwing code over the wall to ops is long gone - I am gobsmacked that you'd suggest that this is for some reason improper.

What dev often forgets, and the cause of much strife, is this justification. If you want a team of n people to learn this new thing and its new ways of operating, then you need to do an honest, dispassionate cost/value analysis. And show your work, dammit. When this never happens, it conveys an "Oh great, Dev is on one of their 'Ooh, shiny!' kicks again" mentality to the rest of the team, especially those that aren't politically connected enough in the org to know any different. I know it's because you're busy and have insane deadlines to meet. Meanwhile, the phones ring at 3am, and the message is lost.

The result is a strained and adversarial relationship, often to the customer's detriment.

[thesuitonym]

I work in IT, so not exactly the same, but I can relate so much to your pain. Teams are constantly bringing in some half-baked app that "Worked in the demo" and give us the registration key and a date to have it running by. Invariably it become the biggest headache for us, because it never works, fails at the worst times, etc. And when it doesn't work, who is the finger pointed at? The person who bought into it wholesale without any testing, or the team who's been working 60+ hours every week trying to string it up with paper clips and rubber bands?

[jsmthrowaway]

That's exactly the same. Don't sell yourself short. You're doing operations with a different audience, and that type of behavior is just as common in external-facing operations. Hell, it doesn't even have to be an off-the-shelf product; I've been through that song and dance with in-house software.

[curun1r]

> As long as me and my ops team are the primary people with skin in the game (read: getting 3AM wakeup calls), me and my team will maintain a say in what tech stack we're responsible for the care and feeding of. The days of dev throwing code over the wall to ops is long gone.

Here's where we're in violent agreement. I believe the best way to ensure that the pager doesn't go off at 2am is to give that duty to developers. Far and away the most likely reason for a production issue is new code that went live. No matter how good communication is within an organization, ops will never have the same context for issues like this that dev will. So dev being the tip of the spear with regard to incident response will result in faster resolution. The job of ops is to be an enabler of this responsibility. They should be building tooling and infrastructure that makes it easy for dev to do the right thing but doesn't force decisions on dev. Ops is an abstraction layer that gives developers higher-level primitives for infrastructure that allows them to solve the customer problems more easily.

But there's no substitute for the dual benefit that you get from a) oh...I wonder if this problem is related to that change I reviewed yesterday and b) hmm...I've got pager duty this weekend, so perhaps I shouldn't just LGTM this PR. And for that reason, developers and developers alone are responsible for a working application. Ops is only there for support.