|
| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: "Balancing DevOps and Mental Health: Strategies to Avoid Burnout" |
| 3 | +date: 2025-10-06T08:00:00-06:00 |
| 4 | +publishDate: 2025-10-06T10:00:00-06:00 |
| 5 | +description: "Tips and personal experiences for maintaining well-being while working in high-pressure infrastructure roles." |
| 6 | +categories: |
| 7 | + - Life |
| 8 | + - devops |
| 9 | +tags: |
| 10 | + - mental health |
| 11 | + - burnout |
| 12 | + - self care |
| 13 | +menu: |
| 14 | + sidebar: |
| 15 | + name: "DevOps & Mental Health" |
| 16 | + identifier: devops-mental-health |
| 17 | + parent: devops-cicd |
| 18 | + weight: 2 |
| 19 | +--- |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | +DevOps is often described as a culture rather than a job title. It is about breaking down silos, speeding up feedback loops, and empowering teams. But with great responsibility comes great stress. On-call schedules, production outages, incident retrospectives, and the constant pressure to move fast can take a toll on mental health. |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +In this post I will share strategies that have helped me, and many of my colleagues, balance the demands of DevOps with the need for well-being. |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +## Acknowledge the emotional load |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +First, it is important to recognize that being the person responsible for uptime can be emotionally draining. The stress of a 3 AM page, or of debugging a broken pipeline right before a big launch, is real. Acknowledging these feelings, rather than ignoring them, is the first step toward managing them. |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | +## A real day in the life: EC2 Postgres to RDS |
| 30 | + |
| 31 | +One morning I started a planned migration from Postgres on EC2 to Amazon RDS. I spent the early hours prepping snapshots, parameter groups, connection strings, and a rollback plan. At 10:00 AM we began the switch. The first checks looked clean. Traffic shifted, dashboards were green, and query latencies held steady. |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | +Then things spiked. CPU climbed, IOPS shot up, and connections stacked in a way that did not match our traffic profile. I stayed up for more than 24 hours trying to understand the load. The root cause was simple and humbling. We had not considered the vacuum work Postgres would need after our heavy insert activity. Autovacuum was catching up, which made the new instance look overwhelmed. |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +We let it ride until the DBA came in. By the time he started looking, metrics were already calming down, so we left it alone. |
| 36 | + |
| 37 | +**Mental health takeaway:** plan coverage for long cutovers, avoid solo heroics, and accept that sometimes the right action is to pause and let the system stabilize. Protect sleep and hand off when you can. |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +## Create boundaries and rotate responsibilities |
| 40 | + |
| 41 | +No one should be on call all the time. If you are part of a small team, make sure on-call duties rotate fairly and that everyone has a chance to recover. Use tools like [PagerDuty](https://www.pagerduty.com/) or [OpsGenie](https://www.atlassian.com/software/opsgenie) to schedule rotations and to ensure alerts are actionable. Establish clear escalation paths so you know when you can pass the baton. |
| 42 | + |
| 43 | +Set boundaries during your off hours. Turn off Slack notifications, close your laptop, and allow yourself to disconnect. It is tempting to just check on things, but constant vigilance leads to fatigue. |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | +## Automate yourself out of a job (sort of) |
| 46 | + |
| 47 | +One of the best ways to reduce stress is to automate yourself out of as many tasks as possible. Automate test runs, deployments, and monitoring. Use Infrastructure as Code to avoid manual provisioning. Each piece of automation reduces the surface area for human error and lets you focus on higher-impact work. |
| 48 | + |
| 49 | +Do not stop at pipelines. Add **self-healing automations** where it makes sense. Examples include: |
| 50 | + |
| 51 | +- Automatically resizing EBS volumes when disk usage crosses a threshold, using CloudWatch alarms with a Lambda workflow. |
| 52 | +- Adjusting IOPS and throughput on gp3 volumes in response to sustained demand. |
| 53 | +- Leveraging RDS storage autoscaling and automatic minor version upgrades. |
| 54 | + |
| 55 | +Use the time saved to rest or pursue interests outside of work, not to take on an unsustainable amount of new work. |
| 56 | + |
| 57 | +## Communicate openly |
| 58 | + |
| 59 | +DevOps thrives on open communication. The same principle applies to mental health. If you are feeling overwhelmed, speak up. Whether it is with your manager, a trusted colleague, or a mental health professional, sharing your struggles can lighten the burden. Chances are that others are feeling the same way. |
| 60 | + |
| 61 | +## Practice continuous improvement on yourself |
| 62 | + |
| 63 | +We love applying continuous improvement frameworks to our software systems: run retrospectives, track metrics, iterate. Apply the same mindset to yourself. After a difficult incident, ask what you learned about your limits, your support network, and your boundaries. Celebrate your successes, no matter how small, and reflect on your growth. |
| 64 | + |
| 65 | +Build self-care into your routine. For me that means exercise, getting outside, journaling, and time with loved ones. Your routine may look different, but the key is to make it non-negotiable. |
| 66 | + |
| 67 | +DevOps is a marathon, not a sprint. With clear boundaries, thoughtful automation, and honest communication, you can sustain a long and fulfilling career without burning out. |
0 commit comments