DevOps, OpsDev or a bit of both?

At a recent meetup a group of us were joking around with the term OpsDev because in our experience DevOps is more often than not pushed from the operations side rather than development. So the question came up "why do the devs get to come first?" Googling the term OpsDev later I discovered it is a real thing.

The UK website Business Computing World carries a passionate piece by Randy Clark from 2012 in which he argues:

For me, in whichever context Ops is talked about, the industry is still getting it back to-front. It should be OPSdev, OPSweb, OPScloud. Ops isn’t just important; it’s essential. Putting Ops second is a sign that although businesses realise its role, they don’t fully understand the far reaching effect of Ops.

This HP white paper from 2013 states:

After engaging with many enterprises, we learned that the adoption of DevOps practices and methodologies in large enterprises is often driven by IT operations, and not necessarily by the developers of the Line of Businesses. We call this OpsDev.

The paper goes on to talk about how DevOps and OpsDev often address the same business problems but they are often driven by different concerns. I found this image a particularly interesting illustration of this.


None of the goals listed here under DevOps can be realized without those under OpsDev and vice versa. This is the key to understanding the collaboration component of the DevOps culture. For better or worse, Patrick Debois chose to call his conference DevOpsDays in 2009 and the now infamous twitter hash tag #DevOps was borne. Along with it emerged a massive cultural movement that can not be turned back.

What is DevOps?

For a lot of people in operations, myself included, it was difficult to get what the hype was about back in 2009. Moreover the question a lot of ops folks asked is "Why does dev have to come first?"
Automation, continuous integration and deployment, collaboration between ops and dev, aren't these all just operations best practices? This is what good Sys Admins have advocated for years. Add to this the marketing hype attached to DevOps in recent years and we begin to see some justification for the skepticism.

But the movement has proved the skeptics wrong in a number of ways. The DevOps movement brought to the fore frustrations felt within many engineering organizations. Developers were frustrated with traditional operations teams inability to respond with the perceived urgency demanded. Operations people were equally frustrated with being treated like human keyboards and other people's poor planning becoming their emergency. What had been discussed for years over beers now became the topic of industry wide conferences. Tools began to emerge to help solve some of these problems in a more generalized way.

The DevOps movement enabled software engineers and engineering managers to begin thinking about what goes on after the code is deployed. The Agile movement had taken us a long way towards this with automated testing and continuous delivery. Developers became more involved in deployments but it was still the responsibility of the operations team to run and maintain production. The proverbial wall was still there and the code was essentially still thrown over it. Where it landed was the responsibility of operations.

Virtualization and cloud computing has taken us further along the road of true collaboration. It has made possible the full realization of Infrastructure as Code. This in turn has made it possible to enable developers to provision their own infrastructure. Some have interpreted this as NoOps and even gone so far as to eliminate their operations teams. That is a big mistake.

DevOps + Cloud do not eradicate the need for operations. Rather they illustrate the need for OpsDev -- Operations people who get DevOps alongside DevOps -- Developers who get DevOps. I am not proposing here to start using the term OpsDev in place of DevOps. It is way too late for a name change here. What I am trying to illustrate is that DevOps practices and culture need to be embraced by both operations teams and development teams. Once the teams themselves are collaborating better the next challenge is the cross team collaboration. When we begin to bring together the acquired skills and best practices of operations with those of software engineering we can build some truly awesome systems. This is what DevOps done right enables.