The Importance of DevOps Team Structure

The team is autonomous within set boundaries and is aligned to other teams through a clear vision and goal definition therefore is interdependent on others. As the company and system complexity grows, such a team tends to move from being able to have deep positive impact on everything to making a lot more shallow contributions. There are ways to mitigate this phenomenon without completely changing the implementation or starting another team . No coverage gaps between SRE teams, given that only one team is in place. There are two main reasons why it’s often hard to structure a DevOps team. The above is merely a representation of the type of KPIs that organizations can measure for and these will differ depending on the needs of an organization.

This can even take the form of “you build it, you run it”, with the same individuals developing and operating applications. The key to success for this team structure is that developers understand the pressure on operational teams to maintain uptime and minimize resolutions. Just as important is for operations teams to understand the desire of development teams to reduce deployment time and time to market. Dev and Ops Collaboration is one of the most common team structures and best practices in DevOps. The key here is to ensure fast and effective collaboration between Dev- and Ops-teams. Depending on your needs, you can switch between using only one specialized team or using two teams together.

Jira Software

The second is that structuring your DevOps team in the wrong way can cause long-lasting problems. For example, a DevOps team that includes every engineer in your business may be so large that team members cannot communicate effectively, which undercuts the collaboration that is a key goal of DevOps. On the other hand, a DevOps team that is too small may leave your business overly dependent on a handful of key employees to handle DevOps work, creating issues when those employees leave or are temporarily unavailable. Your application is a living breathing entity that grows and scales based on the requirements of your users. New features will be created and all of that new code can introduce a number of security vulnerabilities that can severely increase the surface of attacks from a mal-intended person.

DevOps practices come and go as they are put to a test against real-life scenarios. Some prove to be viable, others just don’t bring the results we expect. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the most popular and effective DevOps team structure best practices, so that you can better understand what’s working or not. This exercise may help you avoid overload and premature reorganizations. The implementation details of the tiers vary based on the actual SRE implementation itself.

• Providing the right tools, engaging them on visionary projects, working under competent management and quality people are some of the aspects that will help you retain your employees.
• On-call Incident management is not very different in DevOps environments.
• Adopting DevOps, deciding on a team structure that optimizes, rather than hinders, your ability to “do” DevOps can be one of the most challenging parts of building a DevOps organization.
• Developers translate the design into code, and are involved in supporting the code through testing and deployment.
• A C4E enables organizations to transform their IT teams into strategic business partners, as opposed to traditional technology functions.
• To put DevOps into practice, we recommend trying Open DevOps, which provides everything teams need to develop and operate software.
• The product focus of each team can lead to duplication of base infrastructure or divergence of practices between teams, which is inefficient and limits knowledge sharing and mobility.

Secondly, the leadership should recognize skilled individuals and train them to become leaders with personal support, coaching, etc. Thirdly, decentralizing decision-making enables the team to share DevOps responsibilities across the board while allowing them to expedite processes. The leader should ideally be a role model, show integrity, create a trustworthy environment and inspire others to follow that path. If you’re just starting your journey to DevOps, learn best practices with our Beginner’s guide to DevOps. To put DevOps into practice, we recommend trying Open DevOps, which provides everything teams need to develop and operate software.

This article unpacks the reasons why structuring a DevOps team can be so difficult, explains the most common DevOps organizational models, and discusses what to consider when devising a DevOps team structure. A DevOps pilot team can work as a bridge between silos for a limited amount of time, as long as their focus is bringing the silos together and their long-term goal is making themselves unnecessary. But once DevOps has become mission critical, the tools and processes being developed and used must themselves be maintained and treated as a project, making a pipeline for your pipeline. Organization structure will drive team communication and goals due to Conway’s Law.

IT Service Management

We’ve since adopted a hybrid model, including the implementations listed below. Time management between day-to-day job demands vs. adoption of SRE practices. This strategy will cost more and will lead to a larger overall IT organization, which is why it tends to work better for enterprises than for SMBs.

With Quality Engineering and Quality Assurance going hand in hand, QA teams are happier now as quality is not just their job, but it turns into DevOps Team responsibilities. A successful DevOps team is cross-functional, with members that represent the business, development, quality assurance, operations, and anyone else involved in delivering the software. Ideally, team members have shared goals and values, collaborate continuously, and have unified processes and tooling. They are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the product, from gathering requirements, to building and testing the software, to delivering it into production, and monitoring and maintaining the software in production.

Best Practices for Building a Microservices Architecture

Infrastructure as Code is an innovative concept of managing infrastructure operations using code. Unlike traditional environments wherein manual configuration files and scripts are used to manage configuration, IaC performs operations using code in an automated environment. It treats infrastructure as code applying version control systems, monitoring tools, virtualization tests to automate and govern the operations as you do with code releases.

Another ingredient for success is a leader willing to evangelize DevOps to a team, collaborative teams, and the organization at large. Joseph is a global best practice trainer and consultant with over 14 years corporate experience. His specialties are IT Service Management, Business Process Reengineering, Cyber Resilience and Project Management. BMC works with 86% of the Forbes Global 50 and customers and partners around the world to create their future. All required competencies to develop and manage products should be within the team. Attainment of comb-shaped competencies is preferred for all team members, as well as continuous knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Anti-Pattern #3: Dev, Ops, and DevOps Silos

When it comes to the DevOps team structure, the release manager holds one of the most demanding and stressful roles. The release manager is responsible for the entire release lifecycle, right from planning, scheduling, automating, and managing continuous delivery environments. Release managers are mostly Ops-focused wherein they design an automation pipeline for a smooth progression of code to production, monitor feedback, reports, and plan the next release, working in an endless loop.

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 DevOps evangelist will ensure that the responsibilities of DevOps processes are assigned to the right people. The smallest DevOps team should comprise the following people; A software developer/tester, automation engineer/automation expert, quality assurance professional, security engineer, and release manager. The granularity of the team ultimately depends on the size of the organization. DevOps teams are usually made up of people with skills in both development and operations. Some team members can be stronger at writing code while others may be more skilled at operating and managing infrastructure.

Step 1: Assembling Resources for the DevOps Team Structure

It is not just abstracting hardware capabilities but also involves other processes such as automation, orchestration, APIs, containerization, security, routing, UX design, etc. Public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud are a few examples of popular cloud architectures. DevOps teams are ideally led by a senior member of the organization who knows devops team structure business processes, has the technical expertise, and interacts with all employees. The leader should have a clear vision and articulate the vision across the team, drive intent, inspire, motivate and encourage everyone. Seamless collaboration and engagement help everyone not only to be motivated but align with organizational objectives.

Use Smaller Team Structures

By linking tickets to corresponding releases or changes, you can reduce errors and build apps faster. IT support is another important team that should be integrated into the DevOps lifecycle. It should be automated to match the speed and scale of agile development. When developers push code to production, they can convey known errors to the support team.

It is hard to do that when team members are reporting to different departments, being measured on different criteria, and working towards different goals. Perhaps it is easiest to start with some examples of anti-patterns — structures that are almost always doomed to fail. These organizational structures bring with them some significant hurdles to success. Every new iteration of the code or every new feature pushed runs the risk of introducing bugs and incompatibilities issues. Measuring the number of these types of issues introduced with every push can help you understand the effectiveness of your team.

The goal of this team is to reduce the load of stream-aligned teams who work on systems that include or use the subsystem. With the complicated-subsystem team’s expertise and capabilities, stream-aligned teams don’t have to build capabilities in areas too complicated for their daily work. Team members from this team may have specialized knowledge in certain microservices (i.e. a billing service), algorithms, or even artificial intelligence.

It also facilitates seamless collaboration between development and operations teams. We’ve also observed software development to be an effective tool for balancing these approaches. Once they see the benefits that they can achieve by using that system, development teams are influenced to adopt the practices through the provided tooling. As adoption of such a system grows, the approach can then shift to target improvements for SREs and set mandates through reliability-related conformance tests. The above roles can enable organizations to form the foundation necessary for DevOps.

It only happens when everyone imbibes this change, practices, and evangelizes the concept. Since the stream-aligned team is the most common team type in organizations, the role of other teams is defined relative to stream-aligned teams. Stream-aligned teams should regularly reach out to the following supporting teams to continuously improve the speed of delivery and quality of their products and services.