Service Teams On-Call: Balancing Development and Operations

Each service team carries dual responsibility for both development and on-call duties, including incident management for their specific services. This often goes by the DevOps philosophy of "You build it, you run it".

Service team on-call model distribution

Advantages

• Having the people who built the service also maintain it often leads to faster MTTR. They're familiar with the system intricacies, enabling quicker identification of anomalies and problem-solving.

• This model can also promote better software practices as developers directly experience the operational impacts of their code.

Challenges

• As an organization grows and the number of service teams increases, this model can become complex and challenging to manage, especially with diverse technologies across different teams.

• Being on-call can be stressful and can distract developers from their primary job of building new features.

Ideal Use Case

• This approach is most effective when your software changes frequently. The developers who are implementing these changes are also those managing incidents, leading to more efficient troubleshooting and resolution.

• This model is often used by smaller teams or startups, where developers may wear many hats, including being responsible for maintaining the systems they build.