One of the things I see ignored in these discussions is the strategic timeline. Yes, dev teams can yeet out software like crazy without an ops team. But eventually you build up this giant mass of software the dev team is responsible for. Ops was never involved until one day the mgmt chain for the dev team realizes he can free up a bunch of capacity by dumping his responsibilities onto ops.
IMO, some of these practices come from businesses with huge rivers of money who can hire and retain world class talent. I’d like to see some case studies of how it works when your tiny DevOps team is spending 80% of their time managing a huge portfolio of small apps. How then do you deliver “new, shiny” business value and keep devs and business stakeholders engaged and onboard?
I might be misunderstanding you, but this line makes me think you misunderstood the k8s/serverless/devops argument:
> your tiny DevOps team is spending 80% of their time managing a huge portfolio of small apps
In a DevOps world (the theory goes), the DevOps team supports the core infrastructure (k8s, in this case) while the dev teams own the CI pipelines, deployment, monitoring, etc. The dev teams operate their own applications (hence DevOps), the "DevOps team" just provides a platform that facilitates this model--basically tech like k8s, serverless, docker, etc free dev teams from needing to manage VMs (bin packing applications into VM images, configuring SSH, process management, centralized logging, monitoring, etc) and having the sysadmin skillset required to do so well [^1]. You can disagree with the theory if you like, but your comment didn't seem to be addressing the theory (sincere apologies and please correct me if I misunderstood your argument).
[^1] Someone will inevitably try to make the argument that appdevs should have to learn to "do it right" and learn the sysadmin skillset, but such sysadmin/appdev employees are rare/expensive and it's cheaper to have a few of them who can build out kubernetes solutions that the rest of the non-sysadmin appdevs can use much more readily.
I approached K8s specifically from the point of Ops. It simplifies the story of supporting many applications immensely, in fact my first production deployment was done explicitly due to that reason - we have over 60 applications, we can't really reduce that number without unholy mess of rewrites that isn't certain to reduce that number at all.
Come kubernetes, and we have a way to blackbox developer excesses, push 12 factor onto it, and generally out of over 60 present apps, we have reduced our workload to really caring about maybe 5 classes of them, as they are commonalized enough that we can forget them most of the time.
At different job, we're pushing heavily towards standarized applications, to the point of Ops writing frameworks for the devs to use - thanks to k8s we get to easily leverage that, compared to spending lots and lots of time on individual cases.
IMO, some of these practices come from businesses with huge rivers of money who can hire and retain world class talent. I’d like to see some case studies of how it works when your tiny DevOps team is spending 80% of their time managing a huge portfolio of small apps. How then do you deliver “new, shiny” business value and keep devs and business stakeholders engaged and onboard?