[stephenr]

I don't want to kick a guy when he's down but I think the key takeaway here is "our devops engineer", singular.

Maybe s/he is just a developer playing at ops anyway and it wouldn't have helped but if there is literally one person even slightly familiar with your infra and ops, you have a problem unless that person is Mr Data from star trek and never goes on holiday, gets sick, has a night out, or heck has a weekend.

[kc10]

Depends on the size of the company and how complex is their infra. May be the founder can rollup his sleeves and get things done when needed. Nothing wrong if that's what it takes for the business to survive.

[johnpython]

DevOps is about shared responsibility between dev and ops teams. One guy with the title "DevOps Engineer" responsible for everything is doing it very wrong.

[NetStrikeForce]

Is that true for small companies, too? Does the financial department have to be more than one person, too? What about sales? Logistics?

[stephenr]

Those departments aren't responsible for maintaining the infrastructure your company relies on and customers expect to access 24x7.

Having just one person who can manage your ops is like having a single cop and wondering why crime goes up when he's off duty.

[NetStrikeForce]

Some of those can be, though. Logistics definitely is...

[gopi_ar]

It's just a matter of scale; DevOps is a luxury at our scale. That said, we're getting other devs trained in basic ops to prevent such things..