DevOps has never been about scaling.
It’s about shipping faster. How do we design systems and processes that allow us to go from idead to production very fast.
Everyone needs that.
I find myself agreeing with the part about "scaling", meaning a (good) DevOps team makes it easier to integrate new projects into an existing infrastructure that's built in house. The point where relying on the vendors above becomes more expensive than having a full time DevOps team only happens once you react a certain scale.
A separate DevOps team --> corporate rebrand of the separate Ops team --> no real change, or even slower because more hoops to jump through.
DevOps was always about meant to be about breaking down the separate / silo'd teams and combining them together. Ownership and responsibility is with that single team for their code from development through to production.
The corporate rebrand of Ops teams is what you're coming up against. It does my nut in and I'm sorry to that you have to deal with it.
How do you support tens of thousands of GPUs in a cluster?
Now, I am building different clusters for AI.