DevOps

Devops paints a picture of cultures once at odds, working together in harmony.  And it certainly can be done.  Developers and development can think more about operations, resources, uptime, and reliability.  Meanwhile operations can facilitate developers, agile development of software, and so on.

From the developers side of the house, building in switches and dials that allow ops teams to disable features, or turn-down features when traffic spikes, or problems occur is crucial.  What's more enabling large parts of the application to support read-only mode can go a long way towards supporting uptime in a pinch.

Operations teams can support and work closer with developers to facilitate agile and on-going deployments.  Teams need to work closely together to build the necessary trust, and also build reliable and repeatable processes which support that.  

Metrics and monitoring systems should be available to ALL developers so they can take ownership as well, and understand how their code impacts response time, and server resources utilization.  What's more unprivileged (non-root) accounts even on production servers so they can at least take a peak at things when necessary encourages this type of ownership and shared responsibility...