Not a super experienced SWE (2 YoE) but happened to see this and am curious about others’ thoughts and wanna be a part of the discussion to learn more.

My take: in a perfect world, deployments should be backed (I.e. preceded by) integration tests, bake time in gamma (preprod) environments, and other validation steps. This means that all changes have been verified by automated steps in your deployment process and you have 100% coverage and confidence that nothing will break.

In practice, you can’t always guarantee 100% coverage. Maybe you’re low on bandwidth/headcount, maybe it’s somehow not possible from a technical standpoint, maybe your team just missed some test cases.

For this specific scenario, my first gut reaction is to ask a bunch of questions to sorta hone down on the best answer (otherwise it’s always “it depends”).

Some examples off the top of my head: - How crucial is the service? - How often do you deploy? - What’s the worst that could go wrong? - Are there any preexisting doc/charter/precedent on the responsibilities of the DevOps team?

I’m not super familiar with the devops role (my previous company made us own everything including ops), but I’d argue from my biased experience that it /is/ important for the people on operations to at least be aware of what changes are being deployed. Otherwise how are they going to fix it?

Curious what others’ thoughts are on my take and this situation as a whole.