How to create a successful DevOps organizational structure
By defining clear roles and fostering a sense of shared ownership, organizations can ensure that team members understand their responsibilities and contribute effectively to the team’s objectives. Implementing DevOps teams within your organization can lead to significant improvements in collaboration, efficiency, and innovation. Implementing a DevOps team is not a one-time event; it requires continuous assessment and improvement.
To properly implement the DevOps methodology, you’ll need more than the right tools. Before hiring a DevOps engineer, assess your business requirements and prepare a hiring strategy. A DevOps engineer is skilled in development and operations and interacts with all team members.
Qualities of a DevOps team
Now, every member of the cross-functional team will take equal responsibility at every stage of the product lifecycle. Breaking down silos within an organization is a vital component of the DevOps Revolution. This, in turn, leads to improved efficiency, faster delivery of software, and a more satisfying working environment for team members. Many people see devops organization structure DevOps as simply development and operations working cohesively and collaborating together. Just as important is for operations teams to understand the desire of development teams to reduce deployment time and time to market. By the end of this post, readers will have gained a deep understanding of DevOps culture and its impact on organizational structure.
- Open communication and collaboration are essential to the success of a DevOps culture.
- Infusing your organization with a culture of communication enables your teams to have a deeper insight into the pain points each discipline can experience.
- As the core responsibility of the team would be on the person who owns the DevOps team, a senior person from the organization would be an ideal person to lead the team, referred to as a DevOps Evangelist.
- The current DevOps team structure contains people who are skilled in coding and operations.
- Traditionally, development teams and operation teams focus on policy management, code inspection, etc., and security teams retroactively monitor and mitigate risks.
Multi-cloud platforms are more complex and require high expertise, skill sets, and a proper strategy to make a smooth transition. Here’s a great blog about Microservices vs Monolith that can help you understand the differences between them. In the future, such organizations will likely move on and adopt structure 1 or structure 3. It is beneficial because it has increased speed and agility when deploying new functionality. But this also means monitoring becomes more crucial than ever from an operations standpoint.
5.3. Encouraging Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
As such, we can think of the above list as merely an example of some of the responsibilities and skillsets that are required to develop a DevOps team structure. DevOps teams monitor the entire development lifecycle — from planning, development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations. This allows teams to respond to any degradation in the customer experience, quickly and automatically. More importantly, it allows teams to “shift left” to earlier stages in development and minimize broken production changes. DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability.
In the deployment phase, the application is deployed to the required platforms. This team structure assumes a tight integration between the Dev and Ops teams. They act as a united front, with shared goals and unified product vision. Sometimes, this practice is also called “NoOps” as it does not assume having a segregated and visible Ops-team. Developers are able to deploy their code from any environment (browser, laptop or CI) on Docker images in production without requiring DevOps or Operations teams to install anything. This means developers are free to do more with less involvement from other engineering groups.
DevOps Organization Structure 4: Оps as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Merging and testing code often help development teams gain reassurance in the quality and predictability of code once deployed. DevOps starts with developers and IT operations and management staff — but doesn’t end there. Many DevOps initiatives fall short of goals or are abandoned because of roadblocks in IT infrastructure security, unresolved conflicts in data management across departments and other missed opportunities. These problems stem from failing to include the diverse network of people that make IT happen. Learn where database administrators, networking teams, line-of-business managers, security engineers and others fit into DevOps organizational structures.
Teams and DevOps leaders should be wary of anti-patterns, which are marked by silos, lack of communication, and a misprioritization of tools over communication. In our DevOps Trends survey, we found that more than two-thirds of surveyed organizations have a team or individual that carries the title “DevOps” in some capacity. Read our slideshow about the best tips to create an IT team to succeed in your DevOps team.
Remain Fluid in Your Processes
As an enabling team, the goal is to give the knowledge to teams, not to dictate what they do with it. Often they are just passionate about the broader software delivery process and want to improve it. The focus on products over projects is one hallmark of digital transformation.
They’re also referred to as integration specialists because they analyze and implement deployment strategies throughout the project. Someone with this position works to provide high availability of the pre-production and production systems. This guide is an overview of the key roles that are typically included in DevOps teams. In addition, you’ll learn how these roles contribute to the overall collective effort and their impact on teams. They protect the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by helping increase skills and install new technology.
DEV Community
If you’re a systems administrator with Linux skills and experience across a range of IT management and monitoring tools, congratulations — you’re well on your way to fitting into a typical DevOps organizational structure. Pick up hard skills in programming, orchestration, cloud administration and automation to support a DevOps methodology. Place high importance on communication, as well as project and change management, to share this vital IT knowledge with other members of the team. This team structure, popularized by Google, is where a development team hands off a product to the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, who actually runs the software. In this model, development teams provide logs and other artifacts to the SRE team to prove their software meets a sufficient standard for support from the SRE team. Development and SRE teams collaborate on operational criteria and SRE teams are empowered to ask developers to improve their code before production.
A “blameless” culture is one where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities rather than reasons for punishment. In a DevOps environment, it is crucial to understand that everyone makes mistakes, and these mistakes can lead to growth and improvement. As John Allspaw, CTO of Etsy, explained, “Blameless postmortems are a tenet of the DevOps movement, and the concept of a learning organization” (Allspaw, 2012). We will discuss how organizations can nurture such professionals to enhance collaboration and flexibility within their teams.
Quality assurance
A complicated-subsystem team is responsible for building and maintaining a part of the system that depends on specific skills and knowledge. Most team members must be specialists in a particular area of knowledge to understand and make changes to the subsystem. While adopting DevOps practices is easier said than done, the book Team Topologies provides insightful ways organizations can build DevOps into their company, including what sort of teams might be most effective. This book provides a starting point for how Atlassian thinks about teams. Rather than reiterate their findings, we want to share our own perspective on the team types.
