Living #opslife makes us keenly aware of the cavernous gap between lofty ideals and 3am reality. In a perfect world, everyone would be devopsing sans effort. In the real world, sharing operational responsibility is not as easy as giving developers production access, adding them to an oncall rotation, and saying “good luck! have fun!”
When incentives mean a feature team is concerned primarily with shipping and not operability, while site reliability is someone else’s concern, conflict results. We build in graceful degradation for decentralized systems but often neglect the (just-as-essential) human interactions. As the fractal complexity of our distributed systems grows, we need mindful practices that work with our tooling and effective tools that reinforce our desired culture.