In reviewing Patrick Debois’ great new slides on DevOps for DevOps down under, I noticed that he says that if you have a DevOps team you are doing it wrong. He later hedges with the idea that a team to help transition to DevOps is a good thing.

I find myself working with teams that support DevOps efforts in their enterprises pretty regularly, so this was thought provoking. How I take it, is that if your developers and operations do not actually talk together, cooperate and find joint solutions, you are missing out on some of the key cultural advantages of DevOps. As far as that goes, I definitely agree.

At the same time, I see what I would call the “DevOps Infrastructure Teams” pretty regularly and they are hugely beneficial. These are groups sorting out problems like performing rapid releasable builds, how do we spin up new instances of our standard web servers in minutes rather than weeks, etc and providing canned solutions to both developers and operations. Ideally, developers and testers use a capability like quickly instantiating a server from the private cloud to generate test environments and the operations team uses the same capacity to borrow extra capacity for managing peak loads.

We also see these infrastructure teams serving as DevOps evangelists in the enterprise and serving as mentors as additional teams take on a DevOps approach in general and specific techniques such as Continuous Delivery

I believe we’ll see more of these teams in the next few years and more existing teams that perform these roles take on the DevOps name. For better or worse, they may be to DevOps what Scrum was to Agile – an avenue to enterprise adoption that purists find a little unpalatable.