Web Operations

Trust

A common theme linking the areas of shared infrastructure and deployment processes is the idea of trust. You need to trust someone before giving that person access to the tools you rely on to do your job. If you're deploying multiple times a day, you need to trust that all the other team members have done their job—you don't have time to triple-check everything for everyone.

Trust is one of the most common areas of tension between development and operations. Most operations teams are slightly suspicious of their development teams, usually because they have been awakened by a pager too many times. Developers usually aren't any better, with deep misgivings about whether the operations team cares about the development team's deadlines. This mistrust between the teams is unhealthy and misplaced.

Trust is ultimately built on a sense of respect. If you respect someone's role, abilities, and judgment, it's easy to trust that this person will do the right thing. If you don't respect someone, every interaction with that person will be filled with second guesses, bad feelings, and frustration.

Most of the problems between operations and developers are caused by differences in opinion regarding the importance of the different roles of the two teams. We've already discussed why most companies have created two separate teams; an unfortunate side effect is that the stated goals of the teams are contradictory, especially when taken to extremes. For example, as an operations engineer, you're ...