We are a pretty small team, and aside from one person most of us double as ops at some point. Not trying to generalize at all, but at our scale, it is far more productive to go to something GIL-less and possibly as self-managing as possible, such as BEAM VM languages. Incidentally, Erlang/Elixir describe applications as a collection of "in process processes", essentially allowing you to reason much like you were doing single threaded processes but without the real system implications. What I see as the most important thing here is that developers have a better pulse on resource needs of their own software, since we do a lot of load testing before pushing anything to production, and the ops team can take our baseline data and handle applications almost as a black box. On the other hand, Docker essentially makes all my points nul by itself, so there is room for all approaches.