We've noticed that most technical people in the technology industry are classified as either infrastructure specialists or developers.  The challenge with this thinking is the fact that most infrastructure projects require customization through extensibility, and most development projects require understanding of the underlying infrastructure. The blending of the two traditionally separate worlds has been accelerating. For example, to deliver a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 implementation (traditionally considered an infrastructure solution), one needs to be closely familiar with Windows Powershell, which is the management platform for Exchange. After a day with Powershell, it is trivial to recognize that general programming concepts, object oriented programming, and even .NET framework are necessary even when putting together system administration scripts for Exchange Server 2007. 

Similarly, delivering a pure development project is no longer simply development. Consider Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - in an enterprise deployment, the one will likely need to understand infrastructure components such as Active Directory, Network Load Balancing, Server Clustering, firewall ports, Kerberos, permissions, reverse proxies... The list goes on. 

Infradevs are a third group that blend the best of these two worlds, leveraging the power of best tool for the job, whether it is custom scripting with Windows Script and Powershell, or Visual Studio development of custom applications with the goal to increase efficiency of infrastructure deployment and reliability of infrastructure processes and operations.

A great example was a recent experience where our client was looking to accomplish a complex domain consolidation effort.  All conventional paths led them to a method using a large team of support engineers and a significant investment in third party tools.  Our Infradev solution for the client leveraged custom scripting and a revised process for the migration that decoupled unnecessary dependencies and yielded exceptional results.

We believe that the value in being an Infradev is removing some of the constraints that are found in out of the box solutions.  Any packaged product is developed with its largest constituents in mind, however those solutions can never account for the uniqueness found in every environment.  Thus, the skill set of an Infradev is the secret sauce that enables organizations to fully realize the value of their technology investments. 

Are you an Infradev?