Thinking in Systems: A Sociotechnical Approach to DevOps (thenewstack.io)

submitted 11 months ago by worldofgeese@lemmy.world to c/devops@programming.dev

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I'm the author. With 5 years experience as a DevOps Engineer then Lead, I've wanted, for a very long time, to distill my critique and pave a way toward a healthier practice of DevOps. Before anyone jumps to tell me how DevOps Engineer is a misnomer, I address this in the article.

I wrote this piece because DevOps has all too often been misunderstood as a practice. Here I attempt to examine successful DevOps practice as a sociotechnical solution that weds culture and tools (the DevOps most are familiar with) with radical agency and visibility. I reference some stupendous thinkers in this space, like Jabe Bloom and Andrew Clay Shafer who were the first to argue for a sociotechnical approach to our work as IT professionals.

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[-] worldofgeese@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Hey there! And thank you for reading.

Let's take your example, as a Nomad cluster operator. The Acme Corporation may have a team for provisioning and maintaining this Nomad cluster. The organization wants to give customers the option for self-service. As a Nomad cluster operator on the Nomad team, because you are empowered with agency and visibility, you get to think of creative solutions to the problem of self-service. The billing team? They're doing that too. And your two teams may collaborate. But the onus is on you to be creative and work within your skillset to best deliver.

Maybe you decide to go sit with the billing team for a week to understand the provisioning flow from the moment a customer presses pay to the automatic creation of a new Nomad cluster. Because you are empowered, you act. You're happier because you don't have to go through seven layers of command to be effective.

Does that help?

[-] 1984@lemmy.today 2 points 11 months ago

Ah yes, I understand exactly and that's actually how the company I'm working for today is operating. I guess I just didn't understand the word holistic, but yeah, we have a platform team (using nomad) and we want developers to be able to use nomad to run their own stuff, have their own test environments, and be able to do anything they want without us being in the middle.

this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023

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