The phrase ‘You build it, you run it’ is often misused and misunderstood

“The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations, and throw it over and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it.”

— Werner Vogels in A Conversation with Werner Vogels, ACM Queue Volume 4, issue 4, June 30, 2006

In conversations about DevOps, this quote is often applied to mean individual development teams should be responsible for the management of their own IT infrastructure, as opposed to having infra run by a wholly separate team.

While this is an important part of the DevOps ways of working, it misses the larger picture of what Werner Vogels was actually referring to, which isn’t technical but rather organizational: that of shortening (customer) feedback loops.

Here’s a larger part of the interview which illustrates this:

WV [..] Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations, and throw it over and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to-day contact with the customer. This customer feedback loop is essential for improving the quality of the service.

JG It’s usually internal customers, though, right?

WV No, many services are directly customer-facing in our retail applications. Take a simple service such as sales rank; there is an attribute on most product pages that indicates what the sales popularity of that product is in its category. This is a separate service. It is a relatively simple service. The Listmania service, for example, produces specialized data that on almost every page is adapted to the specific product on that page and the history of the customer. This is a case where there is an important direct interaction between the developers of the service and the retail customer.