One of the biggest learning curves I ever endured in that time was working in an operations team building what I will call a virtualisation platform. They called it infrastructure as code, I called it automating previously manual processes using development techniques. It opened my mind again to a completely new way of looking at development teams outside of the DevOps culture. Development techniques were relatively new in that team but the real value was driven through collaborative knowledge share. System administrators were developing code and developers were gaining knowledge of automating and building up the infrastructure & networking of a cloud platform. At this point, this was the first time I had seen this degree of two-way communication outside of teams already building on a PaaS. This truly opened my eyes to the challenges these operations team face when the code is thrown over the fence and they are expected to agree to run it in production with confidence.
Historically the responsibilities of a production system were formed from an aggregated view of collective specialisms. For example: Infrastructure architects, network architects, security architects, QA, developers; technical and solution architects. What I am getting at here is that each role had a more narrow minded focus and set of key responsibilities.
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