DevOps is a trendy term in the software industry in the last few years.
If you haven’t come across it, it’s (roughly) about trying to break down the traditional barriers that can grow up between software developers (who want to create exciting new features and get them out there) and the operations people (who have to ensure the software runs reliably and deal with the problems if it doesn’t, so are a natural back-pressure on the speed of innovation and deployment).
At Telemarq, where we currently have about 2.5 people, this distinction is not large 🙂 We all do everything and we all deal with the bugs. But the bigger the organisation gets, the more danger there is that these relationships can be frustrating or uncomfortable.
By the time you get to be the size of Google, and particularly when you have a user base that you number in hundreds of millions, you need to find good ways to make this work. Google has a team called ‘SRE’, focused on Site Reliability Engineering. I can’t say that a talk on reliability engineering sounded particularly inspiring, but I learned a lot from this one by Ben Traynor, who runs it. Some very good management ideas here: recommended for anyone in the software industry, and particularly for those in larger companies.
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