Why Operations Matters: Beyond Automation to Real Business Value

Zhao Cheng, known as Qianyi, leads the operations team at Mogujie and has seven years of ops experience plus five years in development, previously working on telecom‑grade services at Huawei.

He recently reflected on the perceived lack of achievement in operations and delivered a talk titled “From 0 to 1: Sharing the Construction of Mogujie's Operations Technical Management System” to an audience of over 600 people.

From the feedback he received, many attendees are eager for automation but still lack clear direction, indicating that many companies have low automation maturity.

He puts forward two key viewpoints:

Operations is more than automation; there are many directions worth pursuing.

Technology is not the obstacle—mindset transformation is.

Five Core Dimensions of Operations Value

1. Efficiency

Routine tasks such as resource allocation, domain and VIP configuration, CI/CD, deployment, scaling, etc., are the foundation of ops. Automating these frees engineers to focus on higher‑value work.

2. Stability (Quality)

Ensuring stable business operation requires monitoring, tracing, dependency management, rate limiting, capacity planning, and incident response platforms, enabling rapid detection, response, and (automatic) recovery.

3. Security

Ops must also handle host, database, web, and application security, including vulnerability management and protection against DDoS or CC attacks, as security incidents impose heavy remediation costs.

4. Experience

From an end‑user perspective, ops should care about access speed and end‑to‑end performance, offering insights that developers focused on code may overlook.

5. Cost

When systems scale, ops‑controlled resources become a major expense; disciplined cost awareness and optimization are essential to avoid exponential spend growth.

He emphasizes that the real challenge is not the tools—there are many open‑source and commercial options—but how to apply them to concrete business problems. Asking the right questions about pain points, feasible solutions, and cost‑benefit analysis leads to meaningful automation.

Ultimately, ops should proactively demonstrate value rather than being blamed for failures, aligning with implicit expectations of efficiency, stability, security, cost, and experience.

Author: Qianyi Source: http://www.yunweipai.com/archives/10755.html