> We ended up spending the majority of our time … fielding support requests from the development teams
This has been my experience at 3 different small-medium companies now. A too small DevOps team suddenly is in the critical path for even the most trivial software task, then engineering productivity grinds to a halt. I think a much better pattern would be to enable dev teams to self serve. Set up the required infrastructure and guard rails, then let teams handle their own deployments and infrastructure. Give people what they need to do it themselves instead of having to open a support ticket for everything.
This has been my experience at 3 different small-medium companies now. A too small DevOps team suddenly is in the critical path for even the most trivial software task, then engineering productivity grinds to a halt. I think a much better pattern would be to enable dev teams to self serve. Set up the required infrastructure and guard rails, then let teams handle their own deployments and infrastructure. Give people what they need to do it themselves instead of having to open a support ticket for everything.