The Philosophy That Changed How Teams Build Software
You Build It You Run It is an organizational philosophy where the team that develops a service also operates it in production. Rather than handing code to a separate operations team after deployment, developers take full responsibility for their service’s reliability, performance, and availability throughout its lifecycle.
The phrase originated from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in 2006, when he described how Amazon transformed its engineering culture: “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 simple principle has influenced how modern engineering organizations approach service ownership, incident response, and operational responsibility.
Why Traditional Development and Operations Separation Fails
For decades, software organizations separated development and operations into distinct teams with different responsibilities. Developers wrote code and delivered it to operations. Operations deployed, monitored, and maintained production systems. This division seemed logical—specialists focusing on their expertise.
In practice, this separation creates fundamental problems.
Knowledge silos form at the handoff boundary. Developers understand how code works internally but lack visibility into production behavior. Operations understands production infrastructure but lacks context about application design decisions. When incidents occur, neither team has complete knowledge to resolve issues quickly.
Incentives misalign between teams. Development teams optimize for feature velocity and shipping new code. Operations teams optimize for stability and minimizing change risk. These goals directly conflict, creating organizational friction where each team protects its metrics at the expense of overall system health.
Feedback loops stretch too long. When developers never see how their code behaves in production, they miss learning opportunities. Design decisions that cause operational problems don’t surface until months later during incident investigations. By then, the context is lost and the developers have moved to new projects.
The “throw it over the wall” culture emerges. Development ships code, then moves on. Operations inherits problems they didn’t create and can’t fully understand. Neither team feels complete ownership, and both point fingers when things go wrong.
How You Build It You Run It Changes Team Dynamics
When teams own services end-to-end, the dynamics fundamentally shift.
Direct Feedback from Production Experience
Developers who respond to 2 AM pages for their services develop visceral understanding of operational requirements. They experience firsthand how their logging decisions affect troubleshooting, how their error handling impacts recovery, and how their architectural choices influence reliability.
This feedback loop, closed by direct operational involvement, naturally improves code quality. Engineers who will be woken by their own mistakes build differently than engineers who hand off responsibility after deployment.
Intrinsic Motivation for Reliability
When someone else operates your code, reliability becomes someone else’s problem. When you operate your own code, reliability becomes your problem. This ownership shift transforms how teams prioritize operational concerns during development.
Teams practicing You Build It You Run It invest more effort in observability, testing, and failure handling—not because policy requires it, but because they’ll directly benefit from that investment during incidents.
Faster Incident Resolution
The integrated on-call model described in the Complete Guide to Incident Response emphasizes that engineers who build services handle incidents affecting those services. This approach works because responders have deep system knowledge that external operators lack.
When the person debugging a production issue wrote the code, designed the architecture, and understands the business logic, they can move directly to hypothesis testing rather than spending time building context. Resolution happens faster because investigation starts from comprehensive understanding.
Better Design Decisions
Operational experience informs architectural choices. Teams that operate services learn which patterns cause problems at scale, which dependencies create fragility, and which monitoring gaps leave blind spots during incidents.
This knowledge feeds back into design decisions. Services get designed for operability from the start, not retrofitted after deployment reveals problems.
Prerequisites for Successful Implementation
You Build It You Run It isn’t simply declaring that developers now handle on-call. Successful implementation requires organizational support structures.
Sufficient Team Size for Sustainable Rotation
On-call rotation requires enough people to distribute burden fairly. A team of three engineers cannot sustain 24/7 coverage without burnout. Organizations must ensure teams have sufficient headcount—typically five or more engineers—before assigning production responsibility.
Operational Tooling and Platform Support
Developers transitioning to production responsibility need tooling that makes operations manageable. Platform teams should provide self-service infrastructure, monitoring systems, alerting frameworks, and incident management capabilities that reduce the operational burden on service teams.
When service teams must build everything from scratch, they spend more time on operations tooling than on their actual services. Good platform support enables focus on service-specific operational needs rather than common infrastructure.
Training and Skill Development
Not every developer has operational experience. Organizations implementing You Build It You Run It need training programs that build operational skills: incident response procedures, on-call best practices, troubleshooting methodologies, and system administration fundamentals.
Throwing developers into production support without preparation creates stress and poor outcomes. Structured onboarding with shadow periods and graduated responsibility builds confidence and competence.
Psychological Safety and Blameless Culture
Teams will make operational mistakes, especially during the transition to full ownership. Organizations must establish blameless cultures where mistakes drive learning rather than punishment. When engineers fear consequences for production problems, they hide issues rather than surfacing them for improvement.
Blameless postmortems, psychological safety, and learning-focused retrospectives enable the experimentation and growth that You Build It You Run It requires.
When You Build It You Run It Does Not Fit
Despite its benefits, this model isn’t universally appropriate.
Regulated industries with separation requirements. Some compliance frameworks mandate separation of duties between development and operations. Financial services, healthcare, and government contexts may require different ownership models to satisfy regulatory requirements.
Organizations without operational maturity. Teams lacking monitoring, alerting, incident management, and deployment automation struggle with production responsibility. The organizational infrastructure must exist before pushing ownership to service teams.
Very small organizations. Startups with three total engineers cannot implement team-based service ownership. Until organizations reach sufficient scale, centralized operations may be the only practical approach.
Teams without support structures. When organizations declare You Build It You Run It without providing platform support, training, or reasonable expectations, they set teams up for failure. The philosophy requires investment, not just policy change.
Making the Transition
Organizations moving from traditional structures to You Build It You Run It face cultural and practical challenges.
Start with Willing Teams
Don’t mandate organization-wide change immediately. Start with teams willing to experiment with full ownership. Let them develop practices, identify challenges, and demonstrate benefits before expanding.
These early adopters become internal advocates and mentors for teams that follow. Their experience provides practical guidance that abstract policy cannot.
Invest in Platform Capabilities
Before expanding service ownership, invest in platform capabilities that reduce operational burden. Self-service deployment, standardized monitoring, automated alerting, and incident management tooling make production responsibility manageable.
Platforms like Upstat support this transition by providing service catalog capabilities that map services to owning teams, on-call scheduling that enables developer rotations, and incident management that coordinates response across service owners.
Gradual Responsibility Transfer
Don’t transfer full operational responsibility overnight. Start with shared on-call where service teams shadow centralized operations, then progress to primary responsibility with operations backup, and finally to full ownership with platform support.
This graduated approach builds skills and confidence while maintaining service reliability during the transition.
Measure and Adjust
Track metrics that reveal whether the transition improves outcomes: mean time to resolution, incident frequency, on-call burden, and team satisfaction. Use data to identify problems and adjust the approach.
Some services may need different ownership models. Some teams may need additional support. Measurement enables evidence-based decisions rather than ideological commitment to a single approach.
The Cultural Shift Behind the Practice
You Build It You Run It is ultimately a cultural statement about ownership and accountability. It rejects the notion that building software and operating software are separate disciplines that belong to separate teams.
The practice recognizes that operational knowledge improves development, development knowledge improves operations, and the artificial boundary between them creates more problems than it solves.
Organizations that embrace this philosophy don’t just change who carries the pager. They change how teams think about their responsibility to users, their relationship with production systems, and their accountability for the software they create.
When teams own the full lifecycle of their services, they build differently, respond faster, and care more deeply about the systems they create. That cultural transformation, not the organizational chart change, delivers the real benefits of You Build It You Run It.
Citations
- A Conversation with Werner Vogels - ACM Queue, 2006
- Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems - Beyer, Jones, Petoff, Murphy, O’Reilly Media, 2016
- Team Topologies - Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, IT Revolution Press, 2019
Explore In Upstat
Support You Build It You Run It culture with on-call scheduling, team-based alert routing, and service catalog that connects services to owning teams.