The developers versus operations dilemma

In a non-DevOps culture, developers are in charge of developing new products and features and maintaining the existing code, but ultimately they are rewarded when their code is shipped. The incentive is to deliver as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, operations teams, in general, have the responsibility to maintain the uptime of production environments. For these teams, change is evil. New features and services increase the risk of having an outage, and therefore it is important to move with caution.

To minimize the risks of having outages, operations teams usually need to schedule any deployment ahead of time so that they can stage and test any production deployment and maximize their chances of success. It is also very common for the enterprise type of software companies to schedule maintenance windows and, in these cases, this means production changes can only be made a few times a quarter.

Unfortunately, a lot of times deployments won't succeed, and there are many possible reasons for that.