That Randy Brown

DevEx and SRE

For the last few years, I've been a part of or run developer experience (DevEx), DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering teams and organizations. And I've had the opportunity to mentor a few folks trying to enter into one space or the other.I've now also been through two mergers of the DevEx and Ops oriented teams into a single organization. Before and through these mergers, the persistent questions have been around where the ownership boundaries lie between these two teams, and how will the bodies of work be different.

These two teams do have lots in commons--especially in realms of expertise and common tools. Both will talk about and work with backstage, helm charts, pipelines (probably github workflows and actions), datadog, docker, and kubernetes. DevEx engineers will be closer than product engineering than most ops teams, and most ops teams will have more experience with day 2 kubernetes. These secondary skillsets relate to their orientation and how they measure success.

Ops teams are oriented toward operations: workload, cluster, and environment health. Runtime stability markers are the measure of progress and opportunity. However, a DevEx team is oriented toward developers: they see engineering friction as a measure of progress and opportunity. When I think about ownership, I think a lot about ownership not just of resources and runtimes, but also of metrics and deliverables. In this way, while DevEx and Ops teams use the same tools, they drive different metrics.