Web operations

Web operations is a domain of expertise within IT systems management that involves the deployment, operation, maintenance, tuning, and repair of web-based applications.

Historically, operations was seen as a late phase of the Waterfall model development process. After engineering had built a software product, and QA had verified it as correct, it would be handed to a support staff to operate the working software. Such a view assumed that software was mostly immutable in production and that usage would be mostly stable. Increasingly, "a web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application's lifetime." The role is gaining respect as a distinct specialty among developers and managers.

With the rise of web technologies since mid-1995, specialists have emerged that understand the complexities of running a web application. Earlier examples of IT operations teams exist, such as the Network Operations Center (NOC) and the Database Administration (DBA) function.

Web systems demand their own specialized skills. Web applications are unique in many ways, including:

• Their use by a distributed, often uncontrolled, user base
• The many independent networks between end users and the data center from which content is served
• The three-tiered model of web, application, and database components (such as LAMP environments consisting of Linux, MySQL and either Perl or PHP)
• The way in which web pages are delivered as atomic transactions, requiring additional technologies (such as cookies) to associate sequences of pages into a user interaction.

Web operations teams are tasked with a variety of responsibilities, including:

• The deployment and instrumentation of web applications
• The monitoring, error isolation, escalation, and repair of problems
• Performing performance management, availability reporting, and other administration
• Configuring load-balancing and working with content delivery networks to improve the reliability and reduce the latency of the system.
• Measuring the impact of changes to content, applications, networks, and infrastructure

In reference to the WebOperation's team at corporate headquarters for FD, responsibilities include:

• Numerous tasks requiring high expertise in the field as well as numerous tasks a monkey with a handful of bananas could tackle.
• Constant racing to assign oneself a task, to appear busy, so as to not take verbally sarcastic abuse via the Web Operations Manager (TBD in near future).
• Deciphering code and statistics to strategically eliminate over 60 inferior teams in a "March Madness" bracket.
• Create/edit the Wiki, so that future crack temps know how to do things better than current crack temps.
• Show up between hour of 8 and 11, because let's face it, your gonna see some sarcastic a** with something to say anyways.
• Worked closely with the Marketing and Merchandising teams to refresh and maintain content for the website via the content management system.

Typically, web operations personnel are familiar with the TCP/IP stack, the http protocol, HTML page markup, and Rich Internet applications (RIAs) such as AJAX, Adobe Flash and the like.