[jowiar]

There's a big difference between people specializing and teams specializing. In every organization I've seen, when you take all of the individual specialists with the same skillset, put them on a team consisting of them (and only them), it ends up being an organizational disaster.

The organizational question is whether the ops folks are (physically/organizationally) colocated with developers on dev teams, or colocated with themselves on an overarching ops team.