IT Operations has a Cultural Problem

Let's see. Linkbait title, latest buzzword, consistent use of "bureaucracy" (I do not think that word means what you think it means - you cannot wave a magic DevOps wand and make bureaucracy go away) and insinuations that operations departments are "outdated"... Yeah, seems like a worthwhile article with a good point.

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.

Jamming ephemeral cloud infrastructure into an ITIL-style bureaucracy is like jamming a square peg into a round hole. You can push as hard as you want -- it ain't gonna fit.

looks like somebody didn't like it when boss said "no, you can't put the new accounting system on heroku"

A few of the responses here are snarky and understandably so considering the author's reasons for this post, yet the problem remains. How does cloud computing fall within the traditional IT ops model? Anecdotally I've worked for a large city and they're still a little hesitant of cloud computing because they see it as a threat to their employees. I'm not sure how it'll shake out but they'll move towards cloud computing eventually and developers instead of operations could/should manage it.

"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

In my experience this is completely true of large organizations, "Most operations departments are inflexible and inefficient because they rely on specialized engineers glued together with manual processes and a large IT bureaucracy – all fundamentally at odds with the fast-moving, application-centric world of cloud computing."

This is a cycle. If the management of the Operations organization is measured based on reducing downtime they control what they can, Release & Change Management. This kills frequent small releases, so development teams have to build big releases. If management in development organizations are measured mostly by delivering on schedule they cut scope. You end up w/ development organizations delivering the minimum to ensure they meet the project mostly artificial timelines for huge releases. Suggesting small frequent releases sounds good to development (assuming they can reduce the operational paperwork associated w/ releasing), but jeopardizes Operation's control of stability so Operation's resists it. Suggesting that more get delivered in each huge release jeopardizes Development's ability to meet project deadlines because there is so much unknown and the commitment is expected up front, a quarter or more (I've seen 18 months) in advance.

There are reasons for all of this; it's not bad people, just a consequence of large organizations. Reducing downtime reduces costs because you can cut support staff. Delivering on time increases productivity because code that isn't being used is useless code.

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?

troll much?