Stream-Aligned and Platform Teams
The 2021 State of DevOps report identifies two types of teams as the way high-maturity teams organize themselves: stream-aligned teams and platform teams. The idea of a « platform » or « internal developer platform » is fundamental to GitOps. While a GitOps pipeline begins with committing code to a Git repository, it is made possible by a platform that paves the way for that new code to move in an automated way from the repository to a production environment.
The platform is how the Ops team provisions resources such as cloud services, storage, service meshes, and security and monitoring tools in a ready-made template. These templates are created even before they are needed and made available to any developer within the organization. The big shift due to this is that developers need not raise a ticket for the resources they need: they can pick a ready-made template and deploy their code in a matter of minutes. From the Ops side, they have peace of mind knowing they have configured this template and that it follows security protocol by default. It does not require developers to separately configure security for deployments.
