How to create a successful DevOps organizational structure

If you really want teams to be able to have shared responsibilities, they need to have common goals. And the only way to share common goals is to make sure that they report to the same people and are measured on collective successes. The team is focused on creating customer value according to the committed time, quality, and value.

Modern DevOps teams may also include other stakeholders — such as quality assurance engineers or security specialists — who can bring additional expertise to the software delivery process. DevOps as an external party is where companies use a DevOps consultant or DevOps team for a limited period of time to assist development and operations teams move towards the first two team structures mentioned . If you are working towards implementing a DevOps model, the most important step is to get the buy-in from your development and operations teams. SRE is also fortunate to receive high-level support from management, which ensures that engineering teams’ objections to supporting services “the SRE way” are generally short-lived. You don’t need to have an org chart to do things differently, though—you just need a different community of practice to emerge. Usually, the organizational structures consist of devs and IT operations personnel collaboration, who work as a team with test engineers, database administrators, security teams, and other related parties.

A new normal for DevOps teams

DevOps is the confluence of development and operations but is more than the sum of its parts. Specifically, DevOps is a system for software development that focuses on creating an ongoing feedback loop of analyzing, building and testing while leveraging automation to speed up the entire process. 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. Firstly, DevOps teams work at the infrastructure level designing the infrastructure for the application migration. Secondly, the team works at the application level moving applications to the cloud, beginning with the least complex apps and then scaling up as required.

This might not be your largest bottleneck today, but eventually, you will face the issue of rigid team structures with poor communication and/or inadequate processes, slowing down delivery. As DevOps is not just a tool or a technology, it is important to see a top-down cultural shift across the organization. Teams should break down silos and find a common ground to seamlessly communicate and collaborate. It should happen right from business perspectives to deployment and maintenance across all stakeholders, departments, and stages of development. With different tools, technologies, processes, and people, achieving this is a herculean task.

The Rise of DevOps Teams

Even if the pipelines are separately maintained for each team, there is a strong advantage to have one team that understands the pipeline tools, tracks upgrades, and sees how new tools can be added. Whether that information is rolled out as code, coaching, or a service to the teams consuming it, someone needs to be responsible for developing the DevOps pipeline itself and making sure it grows and matures. The 2015 State of DevOps Report from Puppet Labs describes the characteristics of a “generative culture” that can succeed in implementing DevOps. Perhaps it is easiest to start with some examples of anti-patterns — structures that are almost always doomed to fail. Although you’ll experience growing pains during your transformation, keep open lines of communication, keep everyone on the same page, and ensure they understand the reasons for the changes.

There are countless tools in the market that enable organizations to build, test, deliver, and deploy with ease. To get organizations started, we put together a list of top DevOps tools that can enable a successful DevOps team structure. The previous steps establish the team structure necessary to start the DevOps journey. In this third phase, organizations begin implementing DevOps practices––from continuous integration and delivery to automated testing and continuous deployment.

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. Developers translate the design into code, and are involved in supporting the code through testing and deployment. The Solution Architect figures out how the requirements will be designed in line with the organization’s environment and existing systems. The Product Owner manages the interaction with the customer to understand the requirements and work with the rest of the team to prioritize their delivery and incorporate feedback. Modern DevOps teams employ value stream mapping to visualize their activities and gain necessary insights in order to optimize the flow of product increments and value creation.

Cloud roadmap

Deployment automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible may help with automating tasks. Such as, provisioning VMs, configuring networks or deploying code changes automatically without any human interaction required until something goes wrong. 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. It is nonsensical to task an individual or a team to be in charge of an entire organization’s software quality and consistency.

• The engineer identifies project requirements and KPIs and customizes the tool stack.
• Developers face numerous struggles trying to perform traditional, end-to-end integration testing on microservices.
• Engage with AWS-certified DevOps engineers, who can help you effectively develop, automate, deploy and launch your product on AWS.
• If you are interested in transforming your organization software development best practices, we encourage you to consider our DevOps services offering.
• No two organizations are alike and that means taking someone else’s system wholesale and applying it to your team isn’t a guarantee of success.

Although this Online DevOps Training Program is the copyrighted intellectual property of International DevOps Certification Academy™, we wanted to make these materials freely accessible for everybody. We believe that only by sharing our expertise we can best serve for DevOps devops organization structure Professionals and for the further development of DevOps Domain. Noor is a software engineer who contributes educational articles on SRE and DevOps fundamentals to our blog. Read our slideshow about the best tips to create an IT team to succeed in your DevOps team.

The product team had an embedded SRE who was supported by the rest of the SRE team at the outset. Because of that structure, deployability was built in from day one and we were able to go live without drama. Keep in mind, the team structures below take different forms depending on the size and maturity of a company. In reality, a combination of more than one structure, or one structure transforming into another, is often the best approach. 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 Organizational Structures

The particular activities and tasks will vary, depending on the existing corporate culture, proximity to like-minded IT folks and leadership. Get ideas from the experts’ advice below, and formulate a plan to introduce everyone to DevOps, get them excited about it and ensure ongoing communication. Provide the infrastructure and automation tools that the business developers require for releasing and supporting the code themselves. Finding the pain points and bottlenecks https://globalcloudteam.com/ in your organization and identifying their causes will give your DevOps teams a focus towards which they can direct their efforts. Finding opportunities where automation can speed up production and reduce confusion will vastly increase productivity across your entire organization. While identifying opportunities, make sure you don’t go overboard and try to automate processes that you will spend more time automating than the time you would save from that automation.

It is hard to do that when team members are reporting to different departments, being measured on different criteria, and working towards different goals. The key to DevOps functioning at optimal levels is engendering a culture of communication where teams can coordinate among themselves and with other teams effortlessly. It’s a mentality of communication and cooperation that should be integrated into your entire organization. DevOps also requires support and reinforcement by management to perform at its best. It also means it’s hard for people to understand the end-to-end system. 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.

You can be a developer or Operations person who applies DevOps principles to their work. Equating DevOps with pipeline creation defeats the purpose of what DevOps seeks to accomplish. 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.

Jira Software

They are integrated to be able to brainstorm solutions that are being tested in a production-like environment. The operations team is then able to focus on what they’re really good at, which is analyzing the production environment and being able to get feedback to the developers on what is successful. Continuous feedback ensures higher security and system reliability as well as more agile responses when issues do arise. Throughout the development pipeline, your team should have measures devops organization structure in place for continuous monitoring and feedback of the products and systems. Again, the majority of the monitoring process should be automated to provide continuous feedback.

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. This approach also accommodates having several separate Dev-teams that can work in parallel on partially independent products. And they have to strive making themselves obsolete- eventually all teams show be embracing DevOps and their team is no longer needed. 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.

Bringing DevOps to an organization means making some changes to the culture and structure of teams and the organization. Don’t adhere to any prescriptive methodologies if you find they aren’t working for your organization. No two organizations are alike and that means taking someone else’s system wholesale and applying it to your team isn’t a guarantee of success.

DevOps Values & Principles

Among the necessary traits are high cooperation through cross-functional teams, shared responsibilities, breaking down silos to encourage bridging. But defining the correct organizational structure is a little more difficult than explaining the role and makeup of the team. There are a lot of different ways to position DevOps within the organization, and what works in one environment doesn’t always fit the needs or culture of another. A somewhat radical approach to DevOps team structure is to avoid designating any specific engineers or team as DevOps specialists, and instead make DevOps a collective responsibility of every engineer. 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. These problems stem from failing to include the diverse network of people that make IT happen.

Development and operations together

If only such teams recognised the importance of Operations as a discipline as important and valuable as software development, they would be able to avoid much pain and unnecessary operational mistakes. One way DevOps leaders can help fight burnout is to create more autonomy in their teams and not to impose restrictions on them. This means that leaders should not make all the decisions that affect team members, but rather allow them to make their own decisions. A model that they are not familiar with can have a dry run approach, select a few people from each team and work in the model presented to them to see the benefits and negative parts of it. The three we’ve outlined above are some of the most common ways of working that we’ve seen our clients use and that we’ve used to help transform our clients’ organizations. Engaging with a reputable DevOps services provider makes perfect sense in this case.

While a regular software developer writes the code to build a product, the DevOps software developer/tester is involved across the product lifecycle. Responsibilities of DevOps developers include tasks such as updating the code, adding new features, and resolving bugs while ensuring that the application meets business objectives. In addition, the developer runs unit tests, pushes the code to production, and monitors its performance. The first step in cloud migration begins with discovering current IT infrastructure and assessing product capabilities, cloud readiness levels, and cloud requirements. But despite these risks and demands, many organizations are still organizing their people and teams in ways that are counterproductive to modern software development and operations.

Small business

Another ingredient for success is a leader willing to evangelize DevOps to a team, collaborative teams, and the organization at large. 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. However, in large companies, every aspect of DevOps – ranging from CI/CD, to IaaS, to automation – may be a role. This can include a release manager who coordinates and manages applications from development through production, to automation architects who maintain and automate a team’s CI/CD pipeline.