Create the ideal DevOps team structure

It’s about applying software engineering principles to get the job done. Once you have a good design, you find the best language to do the job. That’s why good software engineers don’t identify themselves around a language. Jenkins was all the rage 2 years, ago, only to be bested by the likes of CircleCI and Bitbucket Pipelines. More recently, newer technologies like ArgoCD, Tekton, and FluxCD have taken center stage in the DevOps world. Even Spinnaker, developed by Netflix and once considered to be ahead of its time, feels old and bulky.

A team with blinkers is performing well against many of the PATHS skills, but there are massive blind spots. The lack of automation isn’t clear during regular operation, but it takes a long time to deploy a fix when you discover a critical production issue. Teams filled with specialists, like software developers, are ‘Hero teams’.

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests…

By having diverse perspectives, your team will be better equipped to make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement. DevOps emphasizes the importance of delivering value to customers quickly and efficiently. This requires a focus on customer needs and a commitment to continuous improvement.

Seamless collaboration and engagement help everyone not only to be motivated but align with organizational objectives. One of the major reasons why organizations fail when initiating a change is that culture is deeply rooted. Proper engagement with the team and influencing positivity across the organization is essential. Lastly, as DevOps practices scale across the organization, it is important to measure success and demonstrate the value of the transformation. By collecting and analyzing metrics related to development velocity, quality, and customer satisfaction, organizations can track progress and demonstrate the tangible benefits of adopting DevOps practices.

DevOps Responsibilities: Cloud/Server/Network Architectures

Platform teams promote good technical practices by making good decisions easier to access. An enabling team takes a long-term view of technology to bring a competitive devops organization structure advantage to organizations. If you have to create a groundbreaking 3D rendering engine, you may need a complicated subsystem team to handle the challenges.

This team structure is dependent on applications that run in a public cloud, since the IaaS team creates scalable, virtual services that the development team uses. Overall, the responsibilities of DevOps practitioners revolve around fostering a culture of agility, rapid iteration, and delivering customer value by aligning development and operations goals. The bottom line is that DevOps is not just for developers or operations. In section 4.3, we delved into the roles and responsibilities within a DevOps team. 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.

DevOps team roles

One of the most effective ways to break down silos is by creating cross-functional teams that include members from different disciplines, such as developers, operations, QA, and other stakeholders. According to a 2016 Puppet State of DevOps report, high-performing organizations with cross-functional teams are “2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work.” Experimentation and innovation are key components of a successful DevOps culture. Organizations must be willing to take risks and learn from failures to continuously improve their products and processes. As Nicole Forsgren, a DevOps expert, stated in her book “Accelerate,” “High performers are more likely to make extensive use of experimentation, which contributes to their improved performance” (Forsgren, 2018).

A DevOps team mindset differs from traditional IT or scrum teams as it is an engineering mindset geared towards optimizing both product delivery and product value to the customers throughout a product’s lifecycle. The focus on products over projects is one hallmark of digital transformation. And as companies seek to be quicker in responding to evolving customer needs as well as fend off disruptors, the need to better manage the end-to-end product lifecycle has become a crucial differentiator. The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches.

examples of DevOps team models

The reason it’s called “no ops” is because ops is so automated it’s like it doesn’t actually exist. In each case, however, the DevOps team has to be working to spread knowledge and make sure the teams take on the DevOps culture and processes for themselves. It’s important to have the right people and platform in place before implementing it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with automated processes that aren’t worth much, if anything at all.

It’s taken a lot of pondering, reading, and observing what works and doesn’t work at various organizations to come up with a model that properly honours DevOps. In DevOps, an emphasis is placed on an expert who reports bugs and goes beyond that to ensure that the customer’s requirements are met. Classifying each interaction can help you understand the nature of dependency and the level of service offered. You will likely interact with teams differently, but each relationship should be identifiable as one of these modes.

Why you need a security champions program

Organization structure will drive team communication and goals due to Conway’s Law. Making sure the team members have common goals is critical to shared success, and therefore breaking down organizational silos is critical to DevOps success. You cannot have team members in a siloed organization try to work together without removing the barriers that keep their responsibilities separate. In this team structure, a team within the development team acts as a source of expertise for all things operations and does most of the interfacing with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) team.

• You need to implement more configuration settings when an application accepts logins and relax rules when updates and other modes of operations are going on.
• DevOps helps to optimize your IT organization’s process for software development along each step of the development chain.
• To achieve this kind of seamless and constant loop of software building and testing, you need to create teams of cross-functional disciplines that work in concert.
• This DevOps-as-a-service (DaaS) model is especially helpful for small companies with limited in-house IT skills.
• Start at the organization level, hire and manage the right talent required for the organization.

It’s important to understand that not every team shares the same goals, or will use the same practices and tools. Different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. A DevOps team at two companies may mean radically different things. Whether it’s with two pizzas in a conference room or the adoption of real-time collaboration tools and easily updated documentation, organizations must make an effort to bring DevOps teams together.

DevOps for networking hits chokepoints, tangled communications

As you move forward, remember that DevOps is not just about tools and processes; it’s about fostering a culture of continuous learning, experimentation, and collaboration. A key aspect of implementing DevOps teams is introducing shared tools and processes to support collaboration and streamline workflows. Continuous monitoring in DevOps provides real-time feedback on the performance of an application in production.