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by spaceywilly 1385 days ago
> We ended up spending the majority of our time … fielding support requests from the development teams

This has been my experience at 3 different small-medium companies now. A too small DevOps team suddenly is in the critical path for even the most trivial software task, then engineering productivity grinds to a halt. I think a much better pattern would be to enable dev teams to self serve. Set up the required infrastructure and guard rails, then let teams handle their own deployments and infrastructure. Give people what they need to do it themselves instead of having to open a support ticket for everything.
2 comments
jammycakes 1385 days ago
> I think a much better pattern would be to enable dev teams to self serve. Set up the required infrastructure and guard rails, then let teams handle their own deployments and infrastructure.

I think that's how DevOps is actually supposed to be done in the first place. You view Ops -- and the code used to manage and support it -- as a product, and get a specialised team of experienced Devs (and architects) to build it.

Once you've got the basic infrastructure and architecture in place, you then train up the individual development teams to customise it, extend it and troubleshoot it as they need to. In much the same way as they do with any other software product.

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JamesBarney 1385 days ago
My experience is what inevitably happens is the ops team goes an writes a layer on top of Kubernetes, and now instead of dealing with Kubernetes you're dealing with a half baked poorly written abstraction with zero documentation and no StackOverflow on top Kubernetes. So you need to become an expert in both.

Most organizations don't have the resources, mindset, or skills to support a software library product and should only do it as a last resort.

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lazide 1385 days ago
Most developers won’t know how to do it without footgunning themselves constantly is the problem.

If the dev ops team is staffed enough to develop integrations that won’t allow that AND won’t get in the way, and then train folks and ‘keep the line’ enough to stop the scope creep - they’re probably not at a shitty small/medium sized shop.

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