Hammer meet nail. I currently work in a more traditional "ops" team with our cloud infrastructure dictated by development (through contract hires at first, and now a new internal DevOps team). It's mind boggling how poorly they run things. It goes so deep it's almost issues at product design stage. There's now a big project to move the responsibility back into our team because it's not fit for purpose.

I think an operations background gives you a strong ability to smell nonsense and insecurity. The DevOps team seems to be people who want to be 'developers' rather than people who care about 'ops'. Yaml slinging without thinking about what the yaml actually means.

I think the value proposition holds when you are just getting started with your company and you happen to employ people that know their way around the hyperscaler cloud ecosystems.

But I agree that moving your own infra or outsourcing operations when you have managed to do it on your own for a while is most likely misguided. Speaking from experience it introduces costs that cannot possibly be calculdated before the fact and thus always end up more complicated and costlier than the suits imagined.

In the past, when similar decicions were made, I always thought to myself: You could have just hired one more person bringing their own, fresh perspective on what we are doing in order to improve our ops game.