> “I think anybody trying to toss integrations over the fence to an ops team needs to have an extended tour of duty trying to operate their own solutions in pro

> “I think anybody trying to toss integrations over the fence to an ops team needs to have an extended tour of duty trying to operate their own solutions in production WITHOUT assistance before they form bold opinions about operations constraints.” I think this is one of the worst possible attitudes to have. It’s a petty way to feel, desiring some type of “I’ve seen some shit” tough guy credential more than supporting the stuff needed to actually solve business problems. If you hire people whose value add to your company is inventing completely new things, including deployment, ops, scaling, etc., that goes along with that, then it is the job of infrastructure on the other side of that fence to happily and eagerly accept whatever is tossed over the fence, to understand why developer teams made the choices they made, and to take an attitude of supporting as much as possible. > “You need a plan for how all the components will be maintained, patched, and upgraded. You need contingency planning when some of those bleeding edge components are going to become deprecated. You need to consider what staff capabilities are assigned to do that maintenance work or what will happen when the institutional knowledge used to form the original integration is not on-call to reintegrate it in the face of unexpected events.” Yes, of course. But all this is already what dev teams are doing. Ops / infra is not taking a hare-brained plan and adding these robustness aspects into it. Not at all. Instead they take plans from application teams and try to use policy to minimize their own maintenance burden, even when that optimization is antithetical to what the company requires at a more fundamental level. A lot of companies languish and die because of sociological dysfunction in the policy interface between dev teams and infrastructure. The more that infrastructure has political control of that interface, the closer to death is that company. It’s like a body that is disallowed from generating white blood cells in response to a new immune challenge. Even if the bleeding edge integrations are really hard, the alternative world where you slow them down with policy is death and attrition.