DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

These changes may easily be perceived as threatening for departments, people and processes which are comfortable with the current organizational setup. Business managers can be extremely wary of overloading development teams with the need to use new, complex tool chains that required for building DevOps workflows. As well as learning and keeping up-to-date with the new technologies, there are ongoing maintenance activities, upgrades to build servers, operating systems, plugins, test automation tools, and so on.

Resources allocation – Ensure that the resources are selected with a diverse background. DevOps professionals require diverse skills and require that they handle IT operations to testing to coding to handle DevOps tools etc. Some of the profiles required in DevOps include DevOps Engineer, DevOps Architect, Release Manager, Automation specialist, Software Tester, and, Security Engineer, etc.

Maximising the Efficiency of DevOps Teams

Because we believe teams should work the way they want, rather than the way vendors want. Applications like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are also necessary for teams to communicate quickly and efficiently, especially in a remote-first world. In the past, a developer could walk over to the operations team to ask about the status of an incident. Now virtual communication apps provide that same instantaneous communication. As DevOps becomes more widespread, we often hear software teams are now DevOps teams.

Right from the service desk to operations and development, everyone should be responsible and linked with tickets raised so that they are updated with the happenings in the infrastructure. By linking tickets to corresponding releases or changes, you can reduce errors and build apps faster. 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. All required competencies to develop and manage products should be within the team.

DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

Microservice architecture is a process of building an application as smaller services that are loosely coupled, independently deployable, and use lightweight protocols. This architecture facilitates the incremental development of applications. It complements the DevOps team structure as every small change is efficiently handled. By allowing you to use a shared tool stack across processes, Microservices and DevOps go hand in hand to increase productivity. Microservices architecture increases scalability and reliability. Application availability and modifiability are also increased.

devops team structure

In reality, a combination of more than one structure, or one structure transforming into another, is often the best approach. This model works best for companies with a traditional IT group that has multiple projects and includes ops pros. It’s also good for those using a lot of cloud services or expecting to do so.

DevOps roles: Security and Compliance Engineer

DevOps doesn’t work without automation and for many teams, automation is the top priority. Their work is a must-read for anyone who’s trying to figure out which DevOps structure is best for their company. Even though DevOps is arguably the most efficient way to get software out the door, no one actually ever said it’s easy.

devops team structure

While the actual work a team performs daily will dictate the DevOps toolchain, you will need some type of software to tie together and coordinate the work between your team and the rest of the organization. Jira is a powerful tool that plans, tracks, and manages software development projects, https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ keeping your immediate teammates and the extended organization in the loop on the status of your work. In this model, a single team has shared goals with no separate functions. The reason it’s called “no ops” is because ops is so automated it’s like it doesn’t actually exist.

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Let us see the various team structures that influence the industries. The above roles can enable organizations to form the foundation necessary for DevOps. While not every DevOps environment contains these roles, the most crucial components that need to be built is communication and collaboration amongst team members, regardless of which roles are involved. 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. Adopting practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery is key in enabling DevOps within organizations. However, organizations cannot adopt these practices without building a DevOps team structure that facilitates these practices and other aspects of DevOps culture.

devops team structure

The engineer identifies project requirements and KPIs and customizes the tool stack. He is well versed with automation tools and security technologies. In addition, the engineer is involved in team composition, project activities, defining and setting the processes for CI/CD pipelines and external interfaces. To enact DevSecOps, an organization must set up tools and processes that enable developers, security engineers and IT professionals to participate in security operations. All three groups of stakeholders should have visibility into security problems so that they can counter those problems in a collaborative manner.

What Does a DevOps Team Do?

AWS has cloud networking services for load balancing, traffic routing, content delivery and more. Success isn’t determined by whether you host workloads on premises or in the cloud, and it won’t necessarily matter which OSes you use. Still, a team that wants to design a DevOps-friendly architecture should keep certain goals in mind. Ideally, they have experience writing not just simple system administration scripts, but application code as well. They protect the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by helping increase skills and install new technology. As an enabling team, the goal is to give the knowledge to teams, not to dictate what they do with it.

  • A professional manager’s job is to build a team with a strong mix of skills with overlap while keeping the team as small as possible.
  • Start by asking each group to surface the major areas of friction and then identify leaders in each group – dev, ops, security, test.
  • IT engineers should work closely with the security team to ensure that their deployment and management processes follow best practices with regard to application and infrastructure security.
  • She loves understanding the challenges software teams face, and building content solutions that help address those challenges.
  • Legal teams may need to plug in to DevOps processes to ensure that software remains compliant even as it is released continuously.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the mono-functional teams typically have many advantages. These include greater opportunities for knowledge sharing and narrow specialization within a particular team or department. If you find that mono-functional teams work well with the rest of the organization, you should not reformat them for the sake of the idea of reorganization. What is important is not the structure of the organization itself, but the interaction between the teams to improve the overall effectiveness of the organization as a whole. Dev and Ops have separate, clear functions and effectively collaborate with one another.

Create one team, maybe “no ops”?

Use collaboration tools to create automated systems development life cycle workflows, and the integration of teams into these workflows. Identify a common set of objectives for all teams and stakeholders involved. Often teams struggle to engage when their priorities are different and they cannot find a common ground.