Dang, I wish we had a term for this blending of roles...
But still ops serve developers not the other way around. The senior developers who knew AWS well, basically set the standards and kept ourselves accountable to the ops guy we hired, even though any of us can override him because of our influence in the company.
I started taking away some of my own access and privileges just so I would be the first to hit roadblocks to feel other developers pains who weren’t given the keys to kingdom.
Hiring "DevOps" teams completely misses the point, in the same way that I don't hire Unit Testing teams to write the unit tests that my Devs don't want to do the grunt work for.
When a Dev understands Ops they write more efficient code, as they realise what storing your entire DB in cache really means for the server.
But at least three of the senior engineers (including me) I feel could hold our own against any “specialists”. My experience are too many of the “specialists” are old school netops people who got one certification and treat AWS like an overpriced colo.
I'm a software engineer who went the specialist route because it does take real skill to do this well. Yes, I am embedded on a team of old school netops people now, but I'm in charge of all of this and I get to drag them kicking and screaming in to the modern world.
Specialists are worth it if you find the right one.
Old school netops folks are so afraid of becoming less relevant they do their best to keep control. But at least they are harmless compared to the ones that have tried to transition to the cloud. They are actively harmful costing clients and companies more with little to show for it.
And no I am not young. I’m 45 and started programming in assembly in the 80s.
“lift and shift” should be phase 1. Not the end goal.
Every place that I have worked it’s the responsibility of the team who wrote the code to create the CI/CD pipelines.