There is good stuff in this article, though I wish more writers would hire editors to help trim these articles (I always hire an editor when I write something this long). I think this is the heart of it, though you have to go pretty far into the article to get to this bit:
"What’s the point of this long historical digression? Well, it’s to explain that, with a few exceptions, the division between Dev and Ops, and between centralisation and distribution of responsibility has never been resolved. And the reasons why the industry seems to see-saw are the same reasons why the answer to the original question is never simple."
It is true that the answer is context dependent. I consult with several startups, I give different answers to different CTOs, depending on what stage their organization is at, and how much they will actually need devops in the future (I recently consulted for Paireyewear.com, a company that relies on Shopify to provide the public facing store through which they sell. As such, they will never need much in terms of devops. Instead I brought in Chris Clarke, one of the best devops talents I know, and he consults with them part-time, and that is as much devops talent as they need.)
> and between centralisation and distribution of responsibility has never been resolved.
Its never been resolved because people try to have their cakes and eat it too. There's pros and cons to both ways, but people refuse to deal with the cons. Dealing with that in my current org, where a decision was made to distribute a specific subset of responsibilities, and as soon as it gets even a little difficult, they start centralizing again (within that subset), even when there's solutions to the problems.
So we end up in this weird kind of Frankenstein organization, and that's the worse of all worlds.
I couldn't agree more. As a recovering BOFH currently working on something like what the author describes as a platform team... the amount of times I've had developers bemoan the sentinel and other guardrails in place while unwilling to accept responsibility to meet the requirements of the various regulators and stakeholders is very discouraging.
"What’s the point of this long historical digression? Well, it’s to explain that, with a few exceptions, the division between Dev and Ops, and between centralisation and distribution of responsibility has never been resolved. And the reasons why the industry seems to see-saw are the same reasons why the answer to the original question is never simple."
It is true that the answer is context dependent. I consult with several startups, I give different answers to different CTOs, depending on what stage their organization is at, and how much they will actually need devops in the future (I recently consulted for Paireyewear.com, a company that relies on Shopify to provide the public facing store through which they sell. As such, they will never need much in terms of devops. Instead I brought in Chris Clarke, one of the best devops talents I know, and he consults with them part-time, and that is as much devops talent as they need.)