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by jussij 4120 days ago
To me DevOps is a cost cutting measure whereby an organization can save a few hundred thousand dollars by having one individual not only do the development but also handle the deployment and the testing.

In theory that will eliminate the need for an additional tester and a second individual to do the change control.

But those short term gains expose the organization to the massive risks that the one and only one individual will make a mistake, with no second individual available to do a double check.

The reality is people make mistakes and by eliminating people from that double checking process may well save money in the short term, but in the long run it greatly adds to the of risk failure.

While there are short term gains, the risks to the organization can be massive:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-08-02/knight-shows...

2 comments

That is actually an example of the old style of IT.

The person deploying the software had no idea how it worked on an internal level.

The person who wrote the software had no idea how it was actually deployed in production.

They didn't have a quick rollback in place (this is the exact reason you have quick rollback ability)

The deploy was done by hand, with a user typing. That is probably the biggest risk you can have in a production system. It means that fully repeatable builds in test & pre production are impossible.

I am not saying "DevOps" would fix this, but a bit of empathy / comunications between the dev team and ops team might have averted it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_stock...

Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!