Autumn is upon us- time to come up with another term: shadow operations. Wikipedia doesn’t (yet) define shadow operations as: “an unofficial operations team consisting of senior engineers and Linux-lovers, who tend to form within companies that get DevOps wrong.” Wrong in what way? One day they simply decide that they “are DevOps” now, meaning there is no operations team around anymore. But developers are still used to throwing stuff over fences. The problem is that nobody is behind that wall anymore. Nobody retrained them, invested in them and they’re totally stuck.
So they open Microsoft Teams and start bombarding Jane, the most senior developer on the team. Jane, who was responsible for 40% of the team's productive output is now gradually joining a new team: shadow operations.
And I have evidence for that. In our latest DevOps Benchmarking, we asked 1,850 teams what sentence would describe their DevOps setup best. Full “you build it, you run it” is by far not the majority, coming in at 21.2%. 32.2% are running an old-school throw-over-the-fence setup. Interesting is the remaining 44.6%. You guessed it, they are now running glorious shadow ops. Check the whole report!
While we’re at it, I wanted to point you to our new learning hub where you can find over 100 hours of recorded webinars, case studies, demos, and more. We also have a couple of interesting webinars you should check out:
GitOps setups in regulated industries with Steve Wade
How to build IDPs at scale with Courtney Kissler, who built platforms at Nike, Nordstorm and Starbucks
Observability and Self-service with the incredible Liz-Fong Jones
Winter is coming,
Kaspar
