The famous depiction of Dev throwing work over the wall to Ops is etched in the minds of early DevOps adopters. It showcased the need for merging Dev and Ops teams into unified DevOps teams to collaborate better for high-speed application releases. But in reality, for almost a decade now, DevOps adoption has focused on engineering automation to develop CICD pipelines for applications. Thus, creation of unified DevOps teams took a backseat.
In hindsight, it probably was the right approach for that period since, without end-to-end automation, the speed of releases was not really high enough to demand a merged Dev and Ops team. By working in Agile iterations, the size of releases was cut down, but manual activities and handovers still resulted in longer release cycles. Multiple agile sprint cycles were then clubbed to form a final release. Essentially with no faster releases, there was no need for Dev and Ops to collaborate frequently, and hence the need to break the wall between Dev and Ops was not felt.
