DevOps at the Convergence of Security, Performance and Availability

There are two very nice and reflective posts on DevOps this month by Lori MacVittie over at the f5 blog.  The first one was an interesting take on risk and opportunity costs for operations called "The Pythagorean Theorem of Operational Risk":

[about DevOps teams:] While they may not be the ones that define and implement security policies, they are the ones that should be responsible for assuring they are deployed and applied to applications as they move into the production environment. Similarly, devops may not be directly responsible for defining availability and performance requirements, but they are the ones that must configure and implement the appropriate health monitoring and related policies to ensure that all systems involved have the data they need to make the decisions required to meet operational requirements... 

...The devops team should be the ones that recognize gaps or failures in policies and are able to point them out, quickly...

...Devops is the logical point at which these three concerns [security, performance, and availability] converge, much in the same way application delivery is the logical data center tier at which all three concerns converge from a services and implementation point of view. --Lori MacVittie

And then there was a second post more recently about an 'ecosystem-based datacenter' that also talked about DevOps.  Here's a quote from "Ecosystems are Always in Flux":

One of the goals of devops is to enable successful and repeatable application deployments through automation of the operational processes associated with a deployment. That means provisioning of the appropriate security, performance, and availability services and policies required to support the delivery of the application. Change management processes are a part of the deployment process – or if they aren’t, they should be to ensure success and avoid the risks associated with lack of formal processes or too many cooks in the kitchen with highly complex manually followed recipes. Automation of configuration and policy-related tasks as well as orchestration of accepted processes  is critical to maintaining a healthy data center ecosystem in the face of application updates, changes in security and access policies, as well as adjustments necessary to combat attacks as well as legitimate sudden spikes in demand.--Lori MacVittie

Looks to me like there's more and more expectation being heaped upon this 'DevOps Team' that every IT firm now wants to cultivate.