Operations is more than just Systems Administration

Dec 27, 2015 · 4 minute read

I think one of the patterns of the last few years has been the democratization of systems administration, especially for web applications. Whether that’s Heroku or Docker, or Chef or Puppet, more and more traditional developers are doing work that would have been somebody else’s problem only a few years ago. But running in parallel to that thread is another less positive trend, that of conflating operations with just systems administation. The story seems to go that now we know Ansible (or some other tool) we just need developers to run the show.

In this post I’m going to try and introduce some of the other operational disciplines, especially for developers who maybe have come to operations via the above resurgence in infrastructure tooling over the past few years.

Note that this post has a slight bias towards more normal organisations. That is to say if you’re in a 5 person software startup you probably don’t have operational problems to worry too much about yet. I’m also not playing down the practice of systems administration, most experienced sysadmins I know are also quite rounded operations pros as well.

Service Management

If you’ve worked in operations, or in many large organisations you’ll have come across the term Service Management. This tends to be linked to various service management frameworks; like ITIL or MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework). The framework will describe, often in great detail, activities and processes for things like incident response, configuration management, change management, capacity planning and more.

While I was at The Government I wrote what I think is a reasonable introduction to Service Management albeit from a specific point-of-view. This was based on my experience of trying, and likely sometimes failing, to encourage teams to think about how the products they we’re working on would be run. Each of the topics touched on in the overview is worthy of it’s own stack of books, but I will repeat the ITIL service list here as (whatever you might think of the framework or a specific implementation) I’d found it a useful starting point for conversations - in particular stressing the breadth of topics under service management.

Service Strategy

IT service management
Service portfolio management
Financial management for IT services
Demand management
Business relationship management

Service Design

Design coordination
Service Catalogue management
Service level management
Availability management
Capacity Management
IT service continuity management
Information security management system
Supplier management

Service Transition

Transition planning and support
Change management
Service asset and configuration management
Release and deployment management
Service validation and testing
Change evaluation
Knowledge management

Service Operation

Event management
Incident management
Request fulfillment
Problem management
Identity management
Continual Service Improvement

For each of the above points, whether you are using ITIL or not, it’s useful to have a conversation. Some of these areas do provide ample opportunity for automation and for using tooling to minimise the effort required. But much of this is about designing how you are going to operate a service throughout it’s lifetime.

Operations user stories

One of the other things I published while at The Government was a set of user stories for a web operations team. These grew out of work on launching GOV.UK and have had input from various past colleagues. In hindsight I’d probably do somethings here differently, the stories assume a certain context which isn’t explicitly spelled out for instance. But they have a couple of things going for them in that they demonstrate how traditional operations activities can be planned out as part of a more developer-friendly planning approach, and also they are public and have been tested by more than a single team.

Not everything is a programming problem

The main point I think is that not everything can be turned into a programming problem to solve. Automation has it’s place, and many manual processes and practices can benefit from automation. But the wide range of activities involved in running a non-trivial and often non-ideal system in production tend to mean making trade-offs and prioritization decisions frequently. This is where softer skills like arguing for funding or additional head count, or building a business case for further work, come into play. Operations management is much more than systems administration.

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