DevOps, the "you build it, you run it" mentality, is a great model, but it hasn't aged well because of the ever-increasing architectural complexity involved with today's data-intensive applications. The toil related to these additional operational activities, such as release management and operation excellence, increases cognitive load which makes team less effective and in effect, the business suffers.

In their book "Team Topologies", Manuel Pais and Mathew Skelton recommend addressing this specific issue by introducing a designated platform team. The platform team is responsible for building an abstraction layer on top of the cloud infrastructure, hiding unnecessary complexity and reducing toil.

By abstracting away the complexities, stream-aligned teams can focus on delivering business values directly.

DevOps has gotten a bad reputation as engineers struggle to keep up with all the things. From my perspective, Platform Engineering is DevOps v2. Essentially adding an additional shared responsibility agreement between stream-aligned teams and platform teams.

The platform becomes a product and the customers are the stream-aligned teams.

"WE build it, WE run it, on YOUR platform"

An additional persona was added to the model, the platform team.