Once you write software that is run in places other than your computer by people other than you, you have the right and the duty to speak to those people, to look into those places, and to push updates in small increments once you've learned something valuable from either of the two sources. "You" can be a small team of close collaborators, so not every developer has to speak to users, and not all developers need to push to prod or look into the Grafana every now or then. It's just that those responsibilities should not be gated into remote departments.
Infrastructure is still provided and maintained by Ops. That's exactly the point of my critique: giving Devs access and responsibilities is no excuse to dump the whole Ops department. Managers shouldn't give someone a DevOps-title and think they get 2 for 1.
Similarly, asking Devs to write and maintain proper test automation for their services is the bare minimum - scraping centralized QA is still a bad call, though. Somebody must build and run test infra, set and enforce standards, aggregate data, track regressions, keep the full picture etc. - but they shouldn't block incremental deployments for days.
Once you write software that is run in places other than your computer by people other than you, you have the right and the duty to speak to those people, to look into those places, and to push updates in small increments once you've learned something valuable from either of the two sources. "You" can be a small team of close collaborators, so not every developer has to speak to users, and not all developers need to push to prod or look into the Grafana every now or then. It's just that those responsibilities should not be gated into remote departments.
Infrastructure is still provided and maintained by Ops. That's exactly the point of my critique: giving Devs access and responsibilities is no excuse to dump the whole Ops department. Managers shouldn't give someone a DevOps-title and think they get 2 for 1.
Similarly, asking Devs to write and maintain proper test automation for their services is the bare minimum - scraping centralized QA is still a bad call, though. Somebody must build and run test infra, set and enforce standards, aggregate data, track regressions, keep the full picture etc. - but they shouldn't block incremental deployments for days.