April 13th, 2010 by Daniel Kushner of Nolio

It's great to sit with customers and get the spiel about what's going on inside the organisation. Yesterday I heard the first-hand account and in my opinion also the most accurate narration of the relationship between the Development and Operations of a SaaS business. Referring to a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Operations are like the English who are getting clobbered with cows and other livestock by the French, protecting their castle. The castle resembles the wall or gap between Dev and Ops, and I would image that the livestock are application releases, patches, bug fixes, configuration changes, and the such.

Faced with this ugly situation, our customer is in the midst of creating a new DevOps team, that will sit in the Operations and manage all application releases, deployments, and ongoing updates. In other words - application services. This new DevOps team will also undertake first level application support and debugging. Interesting approach, and definitely something that we'll see more of as SaaS IT Operations adopt continuous integration and release automation, and start to build new DevOps teams in order to keep up with the ever increasing rate of application releases and updates.

Anyway, with some effort, here's a one minute clip of what life looks like inside the organization.