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. Next, as the DevOps+ integration proves successful in pilot projects, gradually scale and expand it to other teams and departments. Share the success stories and best practices to encourage broader organizational adoption.
We have a reliability group that manages uptime and reliability for GitLab.com, a quality department, and a distribution team, just to name a few. The way that we make all these pieces fit together is through our commitment to transparency and our visibility through the entire SDLC. But we also tweak (i.e. iterate on) this structure regularly to make everything work. By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products rapidly. A competitive advantage can be gained by quickly releasing new features and repairing bugs. Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality.
Qualities of a DevOps team
The main goal of the team is to deliver higher performance, quickly recover from outages and fail less. When you migrate from AWS to Azure or GCP, you might have to realign the software. 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. If the goal of the DevOps team is to make itself obsolete by bringing the other teams together then they can be effective as evangelists and coaches. Systems architects who understand these requirements play an important role in a DevOps organization.
A two-tier model, with a business systems team responsible for the end-to-end product cycle and platform teams that manage the underlying hardware, software, and other infrastructure. DevOps and SRE groups are separate, with DevOps part of the dev team and Site Reliability Engineers part of ops. Fostering cross-functional collaboration between development, operations and other relevant teams is easily accomplished. To meet these goals, encourage regular meetings, schedule joint planning sessions and enable shared documentation to ensure everyone is aligned on goals and progress. As with the development and operations teams that have opposite objectives, development and security operations have conflicting objectives too.
DevSecOps, BizOps, and others
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. Many people see 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. The responsibility of a DevOps architect is to analyse existing software development processes and create an optimized DevOps CI/CD pipeline to rapidly build and deliver software. The architect analyses existing processes and implement best practices to streamline and automate processes using the right tools and technologies.
Stream-aligned teams should regularly reach out to the following supporting teams (complicated subsystem, enabling, and platform) to continuously improve the speed of delivery and quality of their products and services. When culture is deeply rooted in an organization, resistance to change is a big bottleneck. 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.
What Is DevOps?
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. Joseph is a global best practice trainer and consultant with over 14 years corporate experience.
Many low-performing teams were previously blinkered teams that were delivering well. You can only avoid these two extremes by adopting a position somewhere in the middle. You must find a mix of people who bring different skill combinations to the team. It’s a complex task as each person you add changes what you need from the next person.
Future-proof your developer career
Unsurprisingly, operations folks began moving into existing software delivery teams to work with other disciplines, like software developers, testers, and product managers. DevOps is not a destination, but a journey of constant improvement of tools, team culture, and practices. If you’re new to DevOps, start by orienting your goals to deliver value to customers. And finally, when your team becomes advanced practitioners, incorporate observability to ensure you’re monitoring, measuring, and improving on the right things.
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.
Platform Engineering
A third way to build trust is to embrace feedback and learning as part of the CI and cloud DevOps process. Feedback should be seen as an opportunity to improve the quality and the performance of the project, and not as a personal criticism or a blame game. Team members should give and receive feedback constructively, respectfully, and timely, and use it to identify and resolve issues, and to implement changes and improvements. Learning should also be encouraged and supported, as team members need to keep up with the evolving technologies and best practices of cloud computing, and to acquire new skills and knowledge.
- When this happens, leverage automation tools to streamline manual processes and increase efficiency.
- In this team structure, there are still separate dev and ops teams, but there is now a “DevOps” team that sits between, as a facilitator of sorts.
- Establishing feedback loops and conducting regular retrospectives empowers teams to identify areas for improvement and implement iterative enhancements to processes and practices.
- The release manager is responsible for the entire release lifecycle, right from planning, scheduling, automating, and managing continuous delivery environments.
- Then go down to the individual level to touch every member of the team.
- Making sure the team members have common goals is critical to shared success, and therefore breaking down organizational silos is critical to DevOps success.
Is your team quick to change direction based on feedback (customer or internal) from the latest changes? It’s often best to use an experimental approach to product evolution. Mature DevOps processes include automated testing to ensure quality code shipments. DevOps starts with developers cloud operations team structure 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.
Ops stands alone
The SCE closely works with the development teams to design and integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring data integrity and security are not compromised at every stage of the product lifecycle. In addition, the SCE ensures that the products being developed are adhering to governing regulations and compliance standards. Information security has to be incorporated at the earliest in DevOps.
BY TEAM FUNCTION
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. This gives stream-aligned teams time to acquire and evolve capabilities without taking time away from their primary goals. The enabling team seeks to primarily increase the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by growing their capabilities with a focus on problems, rather than solutions. An enabling team composed of specialists in a given technical (or product) domain help bridge this capability gap.
They should be laser focused on infrastructure, not product development. Once DevOps starts gaining traction within the organization, the tools and processes to support it will become mission-critical software. Teams will begin to rely on the DevOps pipelines to deliver to production. At this point in the DevOps maturity, the tools and processes need to be built, maintained, and operated like a product.
