Recently I met someone with heavy Infra Ops background at a conference. They made a comment – “We are going back to old ways of working, Platform is the new Ops team”. In that moment, I didn’t have anything to respond with.
A cup of coffee and some leisure time later, I find this statement to be incorrect. Yes, in a way we bought back the times when development and infra teams were two different silos, but the operational models of Infra Ops and Platform are disjoint.
A clear distinction between these is evident when you look at it from the lens of lifecycle management
A platform team is responsible for the lifecycle of the underlying infra + developer tools, but never is responsible for the lifecycle of the application/s deployed on top of it.
On the other hand, an Infra Ops team where always responsible for managing infra + all the apps on top of it.
The amount of lifecycle management done by Platform teams naturally depends on how the base technology they use. The operational surface area will differ if you platform on K8’s or Managed runtime like ECS or Serverless.
Now I can put my mind to rest and enjoy the weekend. Anything else that you can think of?
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