I’ve long held this opinion but I consistently get drowned out. DevOps has different meaning depending on who you’re talking to, even some definitions that appear similar are different in nuanced but important ways. All “devops” as a job title has done has muddy responsibilities and given many folks the wrong impression of what an operations discipline should be. There is also a lot of rewriting of history that gets…
After a lot of discussion, we mostly realized that we get the most value if we define more specific operational roles. We now have the idea of infra-ops, and product-ops. infra-ops is providing a deployment platform - a container runtime and persistences. product-ops on the other hand is responsible for deploying and running the different products from development on this deployment platform.
And this is giving people good ideas. Some products are very simple without harsh requirements. In these cases, one of the backend devs just takes over the product-ops role by setting up a deployment pipeline, a job and some migration handling. Other products are bigger - for example we are providing some of our systems as essentially managed systems to invididual tenants and customers. In such a case, parts of the product operations is with the product team - such as writing jobs, releasing containers and artifacts, and other parts of the product-ops role takes place in the managed services consultancy. These products are currently looking at wordings to split up the product-ops role according to their needs in their context. And that's totally fine - the infra-ops role is also divided depending on the system the engineer is working on. A postgres admin is an infra-operator, for example.
And all of this results in a devops oriented culture of cooperating across team boundaries through automated processes.