[chpmrc]

I don't mean to generalize but every time I had to deal with a DevOps team shipping velocity was much slower compared to when I was able to handle infrastructure myself through a vendor like Heroku, Vercel or even plain AWS.

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.

[dijksterhuis]

Ops person(s) embedded within the Dev team dealing with/helping with/teaching about that one team's "Ops stuff" --> DevOps --> team gets faster because no Ops team hoops to jump through.

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.