[passive]

It's fascinating how much this engineers experience shares with mine. We both appear to have similar approaches to working with technical systems, that has led to skillsets that are more broad than deep. We've both had interview problems because of this, and we've both ended up in DevOps.

I've also had more or less the exact same experience with DevOps, though with (hopefully) a happier ending. I was on a team working for a client that desperately needed "DevOps-type" things. So I built them, and their infrastructure team ignored them.

Eventually we stopped working with that client, and I was moved to a different organization, where each development team was doing it's own thing, operations-wise, and had no interest in adopting a uniform approach, so my (short) efforts there were also for naught.

But then I had the opportunity to come back to the first client, as their DevOps Manager. Before I took the job, I talked to their current development organization about what their pain points were, and what actions they would be willing to take to alleviate them, and I built a strategy around that. A key part of this strategy was gradually eliminating the need for a DevOps team, as I firmly believe the best application of "DevOps" is as a joint project between Development and Operations to optimize shared processes. Once the friction is minimal, you don't need a team there anymore. So we have a developer embedded in our meetings, and have more or less full control of any infrastructure.

[Fuxy]

I think there is a fundamental disconnect between what DevOps is and the classical business organization structure.

DevOps is not a department and it will not work if it is a department DevOps is a way of doing things to achieve maximum efficiency and everyone on development and operations must embrace it for it to work.

If either development or operations resist the change then either the resisting members should be eliminated or the switch over to the DevOps way aborted.

DevOps doesn't work without cooperation and effort from all team members.

[digi_owl]

So in essence, devops treat every projects as if it was a startup? That is, to hell with departments, managers and lines of communications, one project, one team, one office?

[Fuxy]

Not quite, Managers can be separate, accounts can be separate, advertizing can be separate etc. but Development and Operations must be treated as one unit no separation.

In other words anything that can have a line of communication and still work can stay as it is but in order for DevOps to work development and operations must essentially become one with both developers and sysadmins working together on architecting a flow that works for both of them.

One office and one project is not really a requirement but it helps a lot in the beginning however if you can keep the cooperation a culture alive even working remotely could work.

The key is people who are always willing to learn and try new things and putting effort into change and staying on the same page with their teammates.

[michaelt]

So who gets the production system and database root passwords?