How to Build the Ideal DevOps Team Structure

Platform teams promote good technical practices by making good decisions easier to access. 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.

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DevOps only promotes cross-functional collaboration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams by removing the conventional silos to promote efficiency, velocity, and software quality. More than 99% of the organizations adopting DevOps are experiencing benefits such as higher product quality, shorter development cycles, and lower lead times, as per a study done by Atlassian. DevOps can be purely effective, though, only when proper team structure is present within organizations.

Cut the Digital Clutter: ITIL Architecture Management

A team (perhaps a virtual team) within Dev then acts as a source of expertise about operational features, metrics, monitoring, server provisioning, etc., and probably does most of the communication with the IaaS team. This team is still a Dev team, however, following standard practices like TDD, CI, iterative development, coaching, etc. By monitoring these KPIs, organizations can gauge the success of their efforts to break down silos and make informed decisions about how to further optimize their DevOps culture and processes. A DevOps culture is one where collaboration, continuous improvement, and shared responsibility are valued and nurtured across the entire organization. In this section, we will discuss the importance of building a DevOps culture and the steps necessary to achieve it. Platform Engineering is often found alongside DevOps and has a strong link with software delivery performance.

DevOps roles: DevOps evangelist

This variability can complicate governance and make it challenging to maintain a unified approach to security and compliance. At the core of a DevOps team are the DevOps Engineers, who are responsible for building and maintaining the CI/CD pipelines that automate the software delivery process. They work on integrating various tools and practices to streamline development, Software engineering testing, and deployment.

DevOps Team FAQs

Developers and operators collaborating is the key for successful continuous delivery. By its nature, the DevOps team structure is an evolution of the agile model that is great for gathering requirements, developing, and testing out your solutions. DevOps was created to address the challenge and gap between the dev and ops teams. Then your solution is to spin out a new product and service, and to build another DevOps team which takes it over. Here you shouldn’t conceive product and service concepts only as entities served and provided to external clients who pay for them. But also you can freely build internal products, services or so called “micro-service APIs” and their respective DevOps teams for your internal clients.

Usually, several separate Dev teams work on distinct or semi-independent product stacks. In today’s article, we focus on designing the ideal DevOps team structure to drive collaboration and align with your project’s specific needs. The Ops team should bring extensible automation to operations so that regular tasks such as scaling the infrastructure, updating systems, or resolving issues can be done more smartly. It also brings consistency across the infrastructure and enables easy tracking of KPIs.

• Technology advances from multicloud to microservices and containers also play a role when it comes to defining the right DevOps team structure.
• This approach optimizes resource allocation, maximizes productivity, and fosters a cohesive team dynamic.
• The bottom line is that DevOps is not just for developers or operations; it’s for the entire organization.
• Here the development can have multiple projects and multiple teams, similarly, the operations team can have multiple teams for attending the production issues and maintenance.
• DevOps does not of course suggest you to break and reorganize all ongoing projects at your organization in one go.

For an organization to fully leverage DevOps, it should go through a complete cultural shift. A DevOps evangelist is the one who acts as this change agent, inspiring, educating, and motivating people across the organization to Software development embark on the DevOps journey. 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. Tools like Snyk, Checkov, and Wiz are widely adopted to enforce security-as-code in Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitHub workflows.

How Do You Create a Highly Effective DevOps Team

And it’s something we practice a lot when it comes to our own DevOps team structure. We also have other functional DevOps groups besides “Dev” that manage other aspects of our product. If you’re a systems administrator with Linux skills and experience across a range of IT management and monitoring tools, congratulations — you’re well on your way to fitting into a typical DevOps organizational structure. Pick up hard skills in programming, orchestration, cloud administration and automation to support a DevOps methodology.

Jez Humble, a pioneer in the DevOps movement, stated that “testing is not a phase or a gate, but a continuous process integrated into the entire software delivery lifecycle” (Humble & Farley, 2010). Implementing shared tools and processes can enable visibility and collaboration across teams. In the “2015 Middle/Senior DevOps Engineer job State of DevOps Report,” researchers found that “organizations that use version control for both application and infrastructure code have 50 percent fewer failures.”