> The development team didn’t want to – or couldn’t – do the Ops work
But this is just because companies wanted to put the "ops" work into the shoulders of developers. What should be done is to hire one (or more) specific "ops/platform" engineers per team. Such engineers are the gateway for the team for all platform-related stuff. I'm not talking about SREs here. I think SREs are more about making the products as performant and efficient as possible (while platform engineers per team are more about setting up infrastructure). Sure both roles (in addition to the SWE role) do their job best if they are working together in the same team.
What I see nowadays in small and mid-size companies is either:
1. There is a "platform" team. They own infrastructure repositories, but they let product teams to make PRs to such repos (e.g., the platform team usually creates some kind of guidelines for managing infrastructure, like "How to create a staging mongo db"). The "platform" team is on charge of reviewing such PRs and merge them. Now, there are certain aspects of the infrastructure that only the "platform" team can actually work on (because the product teams either don't care about it or don't know about it). This doesn't work because the "platform" team becomes a bottleneck when the number of product teams starts to grow (the #platorm Slack channel becomes a nightmare with dozens of requests per day. Many platform engineers end up burned out because they see themselves as "customer service" for developers)
2. Developers pushing "product features" and at the same time they do "infrastructure" stuff. Companies usually call this "you build, you run it". In reality it's just cheap management (companies don't want to hire infrastructure engineers and they think the developers are excited to learn "docker/k8s/aws/gcp/terraform", so let them have fun). This is ultimately a nightmare for many developers because they end up burned out ("I want to work on product features! I don't want to fix GitLab pipelines").
I think the original idea of DevOps is totally valid. Just don't force your SWEs to work on infrastructure stuff. Instead, hire one or more infrastructure engineers for every product team you have. This way SWEs (dev) and infrastructure engineers (ops) can work close together and push stuff faster. Obviously almost no company is doing this because it is more expensive than the alternatives stated above.
Would you let your SWEs to design your frontpage? No. They obviously have a voice in the process of designing the frontpage, but ultimately the ones that should design it are your Product Designers (obviously for this to work, both your SWEs and your PDs should work in the same team).
But this is just because companies wanted to put the "ops" work into the shoulders of developers. What should be done is to hire one (or more) specific "ops/platform" engineers per team. Such engineers are the gateway for the team for all platform-related stuff. I'm not talking about SREs here. I think SREs are more about making the products as performant and efficient as possible (while platform engineers per team are more about setting up infrastructure). Sure both roles (in addition to the SWE role) do their job best if they are working together in the same team.
What I see nowadays in small and mid-size companies is either:
1. There is a "platform" team. They own infrastructure repositories, but they let product teams to make PRs to such repos (e.g., the platform team usually creates some kind of guidelines for managing infrastructure, like "How to create a staging mongo db"). The "platform" team is on charge of reviewing such PRs and merge them. Now, there are certain aspects of the infrastructure that only the "platform" team can actually work on (because the product teams either don't care about it or don't know about it). This doesn't work because the "platform" team becomes a bottleneck when the number of product teams starts to grow (the #platorm Slack channel becomes a nightmare with dozens of requests per day. Many platform engineers end up burned out because they see themselves as "customer service" for developers)
2. Developers pushing "product features" and at the same time they do "infrastructure" stuff. Companies usually call this "you build, you run it". In reality it's just cheap management (companies don't want to hire infrastructure engineers and they think the developers are excited to learn "docker/k8s/aws/gcp/terraform", so let them have fun). This is ultimately a nightmare for many developers because they end up burned out ("I want to work on product features! I don't want to fix GitLab pipelines").
I think the original idea of DevOps is totally valid. Just don't force your SWEs to work on infrastructure stuff. Instead, hire one or more infrastructure engineers for every product team you have. This way SWEs (dev) and infrastructure engineers (ops) can work close together and push stuff faster. Obviously almost no company is doing this because it is more expensive than the alternatives stated above.
Would you let your SWEs to design your frontpage? No. They obviously have a voice in the process of designing the frontpage, but ultimately the ones that should design it are your Product Designers (obviously for this to work, both your SWEs and your PDs should work in the same team).