Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
I never liked being on-call (slight understatement) or asking others to shoulder some of the load. Sometimes it feels like it's a penalty for being more involved and knowledgeable about our code and infrastructure. And it definitely is a big distraction from core development and innovation.
But there really is no way to avoid it once you have a live product or website with paying customers. Somebody needs to be available just in case something goes wrong.
My journey to co-founding Kubiya.ai was triggered by the very real pain of being a DevOps leader supporting both broader organizational goals along with the day-to-day support of software engineers and others. This is my story (or at least the somewhat interesting parts) of what it was like and how I found a productive approach to managing it all.
It’s really not a joke. DevOps have no time. We need to make sure everything is running smoothly from development to production and often beyond.
DevOps got off to a promising start. Way back in 2006, Amazon CTO Werner Vogel prophesied a hassle-free relationship between development and operations: “The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations and throw it over and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software.”
This you-build-it-you-run-it movement, which became known as DevOps, got us all excited over the promise that it would destroy silos and get teams working together more efficiently than ever before.
My life heading a DevOps team theoretically should have been a dream. We all were in high demand and paid incredibly well for simply being better at Googling stuff than most people. And the best part is that no one really knew we existed... at least until things didn’t work.
And therein lay the rub. Nothing ever works all the time. So our Slack on-call channel was like a booby-trapped war zone, literally exploding with repetitive messages such as: