

Operations as a competitive advantage for startups - jcwentz
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/operations-advantage.html

======
rams
Startups need to bother about scaling and automating ops at the right time.
Can't be thinking about scaling ops from day one. Choose a reasonably sensible
setup/framework that will help postpone large-scale automation.

BTW, don't put ops on a pedestal. In one of the startups I worked with, the
ops dept became powerful to the extent of dictating what software could be
hosted. Ops is important especially when you start growing, but make sure they
don't supersede the dev team.

~~~
staunch
I don't think dev and ops should be separate at all. Most people's instinct
seems to be that once things are big and rolling you should spin new
development off from the day to day maintenance. To "Get the developers out of
firefighting mode". I think that's when bad things happen. Ops can't really
make any fundamental changes and dev is too out of the loop to know (or really
care) what the real problems are.

I think the solution is to have the dev team spend lots of time making make
things run so smoothly that they can run it themselves with just a few helpers
to handle what little work can't be automated.

~~~
rams
I agree that an ops dept. without dev inputs is not good.But the developers
usually have little or no say in this. Once you get past the 2nd/3rd round of
funding, you will notice management acting like, well, "management".You get an
ops dept, and worst of all a 'HR' dept.

------
joshwa
An interesting sidenote-- seen in the del.icio.us bookmark notes for this
article, by a facebook employee:

"nice article on operations. we're going to open source the shit out of this
space."

