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Discussion on: Why SREs Should be Responsible for Development Environments

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srleyva profile image
Stephen Leyva (He/Him)

I’ve found embedding SREs in teams has trade offs as well. One being knowledge sharing across teams (especially if there are a lot of teams) becomes difficult and you arrive at a hundred different ways to solve the problems on each team.

Dedicating teams to build layers of abstractions on top of common tooling kind of gives the best of both worlds as long as the abstractions are clean. This way, you’re building tools for developers who may not have a deep dive ops expertise. The developers still have to be familiar with your abstractions but not the implementation.

At scale in my experience, the embedded model starts to break apart of you silo teams off and one guy becomes the “DevOps guy”.

Just my perspective, It’s ok to have an ops team with a different approach to solving problems through automation and being proactive as opposed to reactive. You can still follow the three ways by

  1. System thinking: Viewing yourself as a stage of the software pipeline. Are you facilitating velocity or becoming a bottleneck?

  2. Shorten Feedback loop: release often and early, dog food (I hate this term :D) your own tooling where possible, and constantly collab and talk with development teams.

  3. Continual improvement: learn from your developers as they learn from you :)

This is just to show there are different implementations of the devops philosophy each with its own trade offs. Just my humble opinion based on my experience:)

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srleyva profile image
Stephen Leyva (He/Him)

Example: The ops team owns environment creation but builds a service on top of their infrastructure to make environment creation self service.

Increase velocity and owning your problem domain with your specific expertise.

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sbracegirdle profile image
Simon Bracegirdle

Yeah I completely agree that there are different implementations of the devops philosophy.

Theoretically you could do this with a separate ops and dev teams, but in my experience it makes it harder because you don't have that mix of disciplines and the diversity of perspectives that it brings. There's also more hand-offs as you pass it to ops to run the thing after building.

It doesn't make it impossible, just less conducive in my experience.

At scale in my experience, the embedded model starts to break apart of you silo teams off and one guy becomes the “DevOps guy”.

Yeah I agree that actually sounds worse. It doesn't sound like DevOps if it's just one person responsible for the "ops" part.

The first way mentions removing impediments; that's not possible if one person is a single point of failure.

The second way mentions feedback loops. Those loops are going to be longer if a single person is blocking the ops part of the process.

The third way mentions continuous learning, which isn't happening if one person is hoarding all of the ops knowledge. It's also not happening if teams are silo'd and not sharing their learning with other teams.

It has to be an organisation wide change, not something that single person or team can do in isolation for it to be effective.