Developers are not the top of the food chain. (Score 3, Insightful)

Several problems with the original article. Jeff makes the assumption that Developers are at the top of a totem pole and all others are below this developer hierarchy. This is the problem with a lot of younger developers, most who are jumping into development with no structural background in the operating system or real production operations. This premise leads developers to think they are superior to everyone, rather than focusing on building applications that must run in an operational context of being well-behaved in the environment they run, and allow for maintenance work of the operations environment. This is why you see anecdotal articles coming out that talk about the frustration and friction between developers and operations people. The truth is, most developers will be better developers if they learn a little more about how their app will work in a production environment. They will build better applications because they understand the environment better. Your architecture should be loosely coupled, that is, it should not stack up on a single server but rather be broken up into smaller components that can be built for scale across multiple machines and be able to fail over to redundant systems. Ops people will be more than happy to help get you there, but you need to think about how your app will fail as much as how it will work properly. The developer also needs to stay away from dictating specific languages -must- be used to run operations. Rather, they need to understand that operations is best suited to a polyglot of different kinds of tools and languages, using the right tools and wares for the job, not being dictated in some kind of nanny state that says you must use this language or that for operations and all others are to be thrown out. All too frequently startups get hung up on dictating operations people must use Python or Ruby or the ops dude is a total loser. This is the kind of arrogance that shows how little most developers really know about operations. Any of the more popular tools should be available to the DevOps person so they can get things done, and developers should stay away from being nannies. In classic UNIX operating environments the system administrator is/was god, followed by an allowance to use the system granted to developers, database admins, etc. Applications have always been guests inside most Linux/UNUX-based systems, even Windows treats applications for what they are, programs that run inside the operating system. This has always been the premise of modern UNIX-based and even Windows-based environments. Ops people follow this naturally, but typically run into developers that don't want to follow the rules. Ops people expect you to write a well-behaved application. Developers expect an operations environment that runs their application without getting in the way. These two goals can be easily met if both sides work together and allow each side to exploit the system, but everybody has to allow the freedom to make things work best for the goal of building better systems.