I worked with a client and a devops team before, I still thinks having a separate devops team is not the right approach.
In my case, the team « responsible for creating and maintaining the tools and processes that allow the dev teams to manage their systems in production », was just a regular OPS team. So they built tools that were not working properly and they struggled to focus on the most valuable parts because they were not using them. At least, they were the one getting paged when systems were down.
My next ask for my project with my next client, will be to embed a devops full-time within the dev team. At least they will understand and share the pain of having to work with a git+terraform ticket system and all the bad ideas that our OPS friends think are great.
This makes sense for a smaller org, but what do you do when there are dozens of dev teams? You can try to make every team a full stack team and have a devops engineer embedded with every team, but you will end up with a different process and set of tools for every team. I feel like having a dedicated devops (or tools or platform or whatever you want to call them) is needed in a large org.
I do work with large orgs almost exclusively. I have no problem with individual devops engineers going back to their team after X weeks or at the end of the project. This way they can integrate avances with other teams and share knowledge.
I just don't want them to stay in their ivory tower and keep breaking my balls with their broken terraform templates.
"but you will end up with a different process and set of tools for every team"
This keeps being trotted out, without question, as the reason for the shared devops platform team. So what if each team has their own opinionated build, scan, deploy tooling?
It's used for compliance security scans now, so we are never going back.
In my case, the team « responsible for creating and maintaining the tools and processes that allow the dev teams to manage their systems in production », was just a regular OPS team. So they built tools that were not working properly and they struggled to focus on the most valuable parts because they were not using them. At least, they were the one getting paged when systems were down.
My next ask for my project with my next client, will be to embed a devops full-time within the dev team. At least they will understand and share the pain of having to work with a git+terraform ticket system and all the bad ideas that our OPS friends think are great.