This article is the extended version of my LinkedIn post.
The Always-On Reality of InfraOps
IT infrastructure operations have long carried the label of being “always on.” It’s not just a phrase—it’s the lived experience of countless engineers. Weekends, public holidays, even family dinners can be disrupted by a sudden call or a critical alert. And often, the root cause isn’t even in infrastructure—it may be an upstream app failure or a cascading issue from another service layer.
Yet, acknowledging this reality doesn’t mean infra teams must surrender balance altogether. The challenge is: how do we soften the urgency without sacrificing resilience?
From Firefighting to Anticipation
The first lever is shifting from reactive firefighting to predictive operations.
When teams rely solely on human monitoring, weekend disruptions are inevitable. But with strong observability, predictive analytics, and automated remediation, many incidents can be anticipated—or resolved—before they demand an engineer’s Sunday afternoon.
One telco I worked with reduced weekend escalations by nearly 30% after investing in anomaly detection combined with self-healing scripts. It wasn’t magic—it was deliberate design to let humans rest while machines handled the predictable.
Shared Responsibility, Not Lone Burden
Another misconception: incidents are an “infra-only” problem. In reality, many issues cut across apps, middleware, and networks. If ownership is unclear, infra teams unfairly carry the entire load.
The healthiest models I’ve seen use cross-domain on-call rotations with clearly documented RACI. Instead of infra answering every 2 a.m. call, responsibilities rotate across domains. This doesn’t eliminate disruption—but it distributes it fairly.
As Google’s SRE workbook¹ puts it: “Error budgets are not just technical constructs—they’re social contracts that protect teams from burnout.”
Learning, Not Just Recovering
Too many outages end with a quick fix and a “we’ll revisit later.” But later never comes. The same issues repeat, draining weekends and morale.
The fix is cultural: treat post-mortems as investments, not paperwork. Done well, they reveal recurring patterns—whether it’s misconfigurations, missing alerts, or capacity blind spots—and break the cycle of endless firefights.
A 2023 DevOps report² found organizations that institutionalized post-mortems cut repeat incidents significantly. More importantly, they reclaimed team downtime.
Rest as a Leadership Priority
Perhaps the hardest shift is cultural. In many enterprises, rest is seen as indulgence. The truth is the opposite: rest is resilience.
Leaders must normalize true downtime, even in high-responsibility roles. That means honoring time-off policies, limiting unnecessary escalations, and fostering psychological safety so engineers don’t feel guilty for logging off.
I’ve seen teams where leadership modeled this behavior—protecting weekends, discouraging hero culture, and celebrating preventive improvements as much as fast recoveries. Unsurprisingly, their engineers not only stayed longer but made fewer mistakes.
Closing Reflection
The question is not whether infra operations will remain high-pressure—they will. The question is whether that pressure will remain constant and corrosive, or whether organizations can evolve to build healthier systems and cultures.
Work-life balance in InfraOps isn’t about silencing every 2 a.m. alert—it’s about reducing how often those alerts pull us away from life. And when they do, ensuring the load is shared, the lessons are learned, and rest is respected.
Because resilient systems require resilient people.
📑 References:
¹ Beyer et al. (2019). Google SRE Workbook.
² “State of DevOps Report 2023” — Automation & post-mortem practices as enablers for sustainable operations.
