Shoutout to Ops

There are people in your company that you probably don't know about. That is: you might be acquainted with them, but you may not be familiar with their role. They're your operations team. They keep your site up and running. They make it so that you can deploy without downtime. They fight DDOS attacks and they make sure your machines are in tip top shape.

It’s a known truth: managing an infrastructure is hard. It's a labor of love, and the larger a site gets, the more complex the operations challenges become. There are more pager escalations in the middle of the night, more edge cases to handle, and more risk to manage when deploying. Increasing complexity is a truism when making the internet, but it shouldn't suck any more than it needs to.

When a site becomes successful it usually requires more technology and more processes to scale. But a site's success shouldn't mandate introducing anything that keeps your ops team from doing their job. Friction is lame, but paying for it is even worse. It’s something we obsess over when we work on Fastly. We're building a product for ops, and we want to build the greatest operations tool possible. We don't want our friends and colleagues to do more work because of us. We've seen how painful scaling can get, and we want to do everything we can to make the process easy. The decisions we’ve made about our product are to make engineering easier, not harder.

So, the next time you're hanging out with your coworkers, take some time to raise a toast, pour one out, or verb your favorite noun to your ops team. They're on call right now, so try not to break the build.