I recently I railed against the “DevOps team” title. But what should you use instead?

Well, of course it depends.

And there different ways to do DevOps, but the 2021 State of DevOps Report points out that

Four percent of survey respondents report they work on a “platform engineering” team, which seems to support the idea that this is an emerging trend in which teams move away from a focus on “DevOps” as a set of tools and practices (and title) towards a focus on the mission of their team in relation to other teams and the overall organization (reducing cognitive load, reducing friction and context required from Dev teams to adopt better/modern tools and practices).

These are all concepts addressed in detail in the book Team Topologoes, which is also referenced by the report, and which I reviewed in the past.

This “platform team” is my preferred approach to DevOps, as I believe it helps us overcome some of the common objections or pitfalls (sometimes imagined) of DevOps.

For example, with a platform-team, there’s no confusion over the question of specialization, as it’s clear who does dev work and who does ops work.