Who Installs and Supports Apache Web Server: App Den or IT Operations?

We have a debate in our group: who is supposed to configure, install and maintain Apache Web Server in front of jBoss in production? IT Ops keeps insi开发者_StackOverflow社区sting that application developers should be doing that, App Dev team thinks it is the other way around.

I would like to reach out to the collective wisdom of StackOverflow to figure out what's the best practices for this.

Any pointers in this would be greatly appreciated.

< mytwocents>Easy. IT Ops. What else could be there job. It is a system in production and not a dev machine. Maintaining a server is an IT operation that involves no development.< /mytwocents>

EDIT: How does IT Ops explain that it should be App Dev's task? Any legit arguments?

Wikipedia defines IT operations as "...services that are both provisioned by an IT staff to their internal or external clients and used by themselves, to run themselves as a business. ... Usually, they include ... installation, instantiation, execution and maintenance."

Besides that obvious definition the interesting question in your case is which department (Dev or Ops) would be more affected by a misconfigured web server? I would argue it's Ops as a misconfigured web server may directly affect the availability of several services. In a worst case scenario, a badly secured and patched web server may open the door for all kinds of malicious activities which can instantly bring down larger parts of your IT infrastructure. Therefore, I would assume that IT Ops should be intrinsically motivated to make sure that the web server is properly set up and running.

Speaking from a more political point of view, I would assume that every IT Ops professional is perfectly aware of the aforementioned arguments. Consequently, I would make sure that they don't have other reasons for dispatching this task to App Dev: are the IT Ops guys simply overworked and they want to shift away yet another task? Are they maybe lacking the right skills, do they need training or a dedicated expert? Are they afraid of the sole responsibility (how important is that web server for your overall business)? Are they afraid that the Dev guys start to modify the web server once it's running without discussing it properly with the IT Ops guys?

I would assume that the core of this conflict is to be found in the last part of my answer.