11–13 of 13 posts
"agile management" is pretty much always going to mean "less management," so it's understandable that management is kind of schizophrenic about the DevOps movement
I sure want Joe Random Engineer committing code that goes live on our real, grown-up site, where we make real money, and a failure leads to us losing real money. Ops departments exist so that that can't happen. If that means you have to wait a day before testing your latest code in production, I don't see this as a bad thing.
The "cultural problem" is in people who think that operations departments don't need to exist because "like, how hard is it to run servers? We'll just put it 'on the cloud' and magically all of our security, reliability, and availability problems will be solved"
The biggest piece of nonsense is this concept of a "private cloud". What the fuck is a private cloud? Oh, you mean a remote datacenter, like we've had since the 70s. OK.
If my local server providing a vital service goes down, I catch hell. If my cloud server providing a vital service goes down, I catch hell and can't do anything about it except bitch at customer service who has their own set of priorities and a TOS protecting them from any meaningful action on my part. So, what's the right option there?
Cloud is IT infrastructure outsourcing and (just like other outsourcing) requires a strong contract. Being able to specify, clarify and hold your provider responsible on contract specifics and making your management comfortable with it is becoming part of the IT operations job.
You need to set expectations with management. One of the benefits of outsourcing is that you should be have an exit or ability to switch to a similar provider... otherwise you are a captive customer.