A lot of devops depends on having systems engineers who code[1] and
developers who own production apps post-deployment - because both roles are
filled by a single person. It's a team of people who individually wear both
hats.

Contrast with having engineers who are developers and engineers who are
sysadmins. Maybe they operate as a single group, and maybe they work really
well together. That's good management, no fancy name needed.

The key here is that ~everyone has a fairly complete picture of both the
codebase and the operations, so they can see end-to-end solutions. One day
might be writing a Sinatra app that's a core part of the product, the next
day is writing the puppet recipe to deploy it, and the third day is actually
deploying it, spinning up a couple VMs, and configuring load balancer VIPs.
Same person.

Where it gets a slippery is what percent of the combined team needs to be
that cross-functional. 100% is a completely reasonable target (and how to
pull off http://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+%22users+per+engineer%22).
Something over 75% is not bad. Under 50% is developers and sysadmins working
well together. Great, just not devops.

[1]: I don't mean someone who can write a Perl script when they need to, but
rather someone who could be a full-time developer if they chose to (and
usually has been in the past, in that more come out of dev than ops). The
best devops engineer will have, at different times, been a full-time
developer and the primary ops contact for a customer-facing service.

Troy

-- 
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