How can I persuade developers on my team to embrace "You build it, you run it"?

How can I persuade developers on my team to embrace "You build it, you run it"? By that, I have this quote from Werner Vogels in mind:


Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced
the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology
point of view. The traditional model is that you take your software to
the wall that separates development and operations, and throw it over
and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it.
This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of
their software. It also brings them into day-to-day contact with the
customer. This customer feedback loop is essential for improving the
quality of the service.

I'm specifically thinking of a set of developers that:

• Were hired into a developer role, with little/no mention of ops-related tasks.

• Traditionally have "thrown code over the wall" to an ops team.

• Traditionally have a 9-5 work schedule, and are actively hostile to the idea of "pager duty", participating in disaster recovery, writing post-mortems, etc, especially outside of normal business hours. (Note: I only have very infrequent outages in mind for this; I am not proposing that we add after-hours customer support to this team's workload.)

• Are not currently responsible for writing/supporting monitoring or alerting on their applications.

Suppose there is a team that is rapidly developing new cloud micro-services with a profile that is getting to be such that handing these services off to an ops team is sub-optimal because they can't keep up in regards to gaining deep knowledge of the services that is required to effectively manage and monitor them. "You build it, you run it" would work better for this team because tasks could delegated to each responsible team member. So this team would begin taking part in designing infrastructure, monitoring/alerting tools for the services, and (very infrequently) responding to outage events.

I am spe

I think the easiest way is to change their performance goals so they are based off reliability as well as delivering code. Sell it as the company cannot succeed without both so why should the developers only be measured on one? The best way for them then to meet their performance goals is to be involved in operations.

Ultimately you need to convince them this is the best way for the company to succeed and therefore for them to succeed. That's hard and you can't expect them to be onboard from the start. They need to be sold on the value too.

StackExchange DevOps Q#484, answer score: 22