In my career, DevOps was never a separate organization. It was a role assumed by the code owners. SRE (is it up, is the hardware working, is the network working?) was separate, and had different metrics.
Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with independent goals.
Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from another, or is it company-wide?
It’s not about just a manifesto, at the startup I worked for before getting into consulting 6 years ago - cloud + app dev - it was much more affective for the team who did the work, to create their own IAC based on a standard.
What’s the difference between a “DevOps team” in 2026 than “operations” in 2001?
The difference is what they do. Assisting other teams with creating fully automated build and test pipelines. Managing infrastructure using automated systems. Identifying issues in production systems that other teams should look at, down to a level of granularity that wasn’t really possible in 2001.
It very much was possible in 2001. In 2001 we automated updating and automating our 15 or so Windows job runners with Perl and the Win32:: module.
No large enterprise by 2001 was walking up to individual PCs and updating computers by walking around and sticking CDs/DVDs in each computer and they were definitely making sure our on prem SQL Server and later MySQL database wasn’t having issues using dashboards and alerts.
