You Build You Own

In the past, companies often hired one set of engineers to develop applications, and another set to support them and be on-call. The problem is the support staff did not fully understand how the applications worked, because they didn’t write them. So they did not know how to fix them if they were broken.

What’s worse, is the software developers were not thinking about how their applications will be supported in production, because that will not be their job. So common devops themes like logging, metrics, alerts, and controls were not given a priority. This made it even more difficult for support staff to troubleshoot issues.

Combining Roles

This lead to the idea “you build it, you own it” (YBY0), which basically means the developers are also the support staff. That motivates the developers to make their software applications easier to inspect, troubleshoot, and monitor. Now they will eagerly add logging, metrics, and alerts to their applications because they know that they are on the hook if it fails. It also encourages them to conduct more thorough testing of their applications, because they don’t want to be paged in the middle of the night, on a weekend, to fix their services.

A Devops Mindset

It is like saying that devops is not a job category or separate position, it is a mindset that all engineers are expected to follow. Following this principle generally reduces the number of incidents encountered with software systems.