People put too much pressure on themselves to do DevOps the "right" way or that they're not doing it like they read about at Netflix or Amazon or any other examples. At small to medium sized companies introducing these new concepts, someone(s) need to own getting it started and to be the evangelists.

Yes, long-term having only a single team as your "DevOps" team is an anti-pattern, but you gotta start somewhere.

What follows is my response to post online about how someone was feeling like they're doing DevOps wrong at their company. And asking why is a DevOps team frowned upon.

I look at it like this as I currently have a DevOps title but didn’t really want one.

DevOps should be your entire company’s culture. Shift responsibility left. Let the devs run what they build.

But you have to start somewhere. You need people to be the catalyst. They need to learn Jenkins first to help others. Much like you describe. A central team is a DevOps anti-pattern long term but I feel like they’re necessary at first. To be the evangelists. To be the first to install the tooling, get it working in your SDLC, to create the pipelines and grease the cogs to get the culture moving.

They likely own the tooling too. Or a tooling team splits off at some point. Someone needs to manage the tooling and host it and upgrade it and juggle licensing.

But be open to others learning. Cross train devs and ops people. Make sure not to bottleneck people needing resources. Find ways they can fire up their own vms, containers, app services, storage accounts, etc. Eventually that is.

Gotta start somewhere. Not everyone is or can be a FAANG company. Not everyone needs every aspect of DevOps people try to shove your way. Not everyone needs to throw k8s at every problem. And so on.

Improve tooling.

Improve dev empowerment.

Improve SDLC.

Improve testing.

Improve blameless culture.

Improve observability.

Improve continuously.

Do those and your company/team will become DevOps too. Your team will evolve too. You’ll continue to expand what you offer and what you can institutionalize.

Or maybe they resist every damn change you propose and never want to improve. At that point you flip the proverbial table and find a place where you CAN do those things. :)

This article originally was published on thebouv.com