Developer Control Planes: An Experienced SRE's Point of View

Cloud-native software development has changed the developer experience but more fundamentally has changed how developers, and the organizations they work in, should think about developer responsibilities and ownership of the full software lifecycle.

Key themes:

• An organization and its leadership needs to get behind the end-to-end "developer as service owner" mindset to make it work.
• Developers should own the full life cycle of services but in most cases don't: "It should not be up to me as an SRE to define how your application gets deployed or at what point it needs to be rolled back, or at what point it needs to be changed, or when its health check should be modified." Developers should be capable of — and empowered — to make these determinations.
• Developer education and mindset will need to change to embrace the "you build it, you run it" approach, with SREs helping to shape and support the developer-ownership mindset with appropriate platforms providing tools and an interactive self-service experience instead of riding to the rescue when things go wrong.
• In this new environment, one of the best things SREs can do is focus on infrastructure and core services to support the main challenge and goal of a developer: shipping software safely at speed. The developer doesn't necessarily need to care about what platforms and tools are used but does need to be able to use them to, for example, canary a service or get service metrics.
• To hand over complete ownership to developers, greater transparency and visibility into what's going on with their services is needed. To "liberate" developers from an over-reliance on SRE firefighting, and facilitate developer autonomy in finding their own solutions, a developer control plane centralizes and ties together the code-ship-run processes a developer needs to understand.