How to help DevOps Engineers feel less like a lone wolf?

I have just been speaking to a DevOps guy who raised some really good points about the struggles of being a DevOps Engineer and feeling like a one-man army sometimes, even though he is in a team of 16 Engineers.

He wears lots of different hats, but sits in the Development team doing infrastructure work. He loves the cool tech that he gets to work with- loads of automation, cloud, containerization etc. But he struggles that he is the only person doing ops, in a dev team. He reports to the Development Manager, but works more closely with the Infrastructure Manager.

This seems to be the case with lots of DevOps professionals I speak to. What could be done to help DevOps Engineers feel less like a lone wolf?

My first thought is "why is the he the only person doing ops, on a dev team, especially when he gets to work with loads of automation?". I think there's an opportunity there to address the lone wolf syndrome; particularly in a dev environment, infrastructure-as-code provides a great framework for sharing the load. Ops people should be experts in determining and defining infrastructure needs for application, but they should also be able to build a platform to let dev roles do as much as they can independently.

It sounds like a silo within a team; old habits die hard. A coder may not feel comfortable spinning up and hardening a server, but in a pure devops model, they should have the tools to do so. An ops person in a devops team shouldn't responsible for delivering infrastructure for the app itself, but they should provide some insight into what is needed and some guidance on how the app developers can do it themselves. It's almost a meta-infrastructure model; ops engineers build infrastructure that can build infrastructure on demand when requested by the development team.

Consultation, communication, and blending of responsibilities are all crucial to the success of a devops team.

StackExchange DevOps Q#2510, answer score: 41