Thoughts on DevOps

DevOps, like most paradigm shifting buzz words, has become an overloaded, muddled term.  I've been thinking about this a lot lately and here are some uncategorized thoughts on this rapidly evolving area of software delivery.

(Most of these statements should probably start with.. "regardless of where you are today")

• Focus on customers.  The culture and organizational change associated with DevOps should make everyone involved in the delivery of a solution (including infrastructure roles) more aligned and accountable to the customer.
• I view this primarily as a movement to apply engineering practices to infrastructure and operations management.  Versioning, automation, testing.

• DevOps is about dependency removal, in much the same way that agile is.  There's no better way to remove dependencies than to add the function of that dependency to teams requiring it. Add people with the skills, or grow the skill set within the team.
• I believe one maximizes agility by removing all dependencies and allowing a team to create, manage, and run its entire stack.  
• Teams running their entire stack leaves the potential for similar, possibly duplicate effort across teams.  While duplication is evil, its tradeoff is agility.
• A centralized "DevOps" team is completely reasonable in my view, but it should not be how an organization starts.  The formation of a central DevOps team should be a conscious decision to follow the DRY principle - to remove duplication that has emerged organically.  As well, the team must not become a bottleneck as teams evolve / change. 
• Ownership boundaries are clearer with fewer dependencies.  If a dev teams owns the app code and ops owns the infrastructure, who addresses an unclear problem near the boundary?

Still thinking...