You need to customize your DevOps strategies looking at the cues offered by early adopters to fully leverage its benefits. 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 pure devops team structure 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.

pure devops team structure

It was about development and operations teams working more closely to deliver software. After identifying and fixing systemic value-damaging behaviors, collaboration becomes possible. In a traditional waterfall software development environment, different teams are assigned different tasks. Developers are focused on introducing features according to project requirements using existing software, while the operations teams are concerned about the stability of the infrastructure. As such, change is something that developers want, and operations worry about. A Performance Engineer must provide excellent customer satisfaction, Continuous Improvement, and understanding of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practices.

Qualities of a DevOps team

Following the pure DevOps team structure and having the right professionals in the relevant roles allows for faster time to market, fewer errors, and a better customer experience. A Cloud Engineer must have skills in cloud infrastructure design and management, automation, programming language, and database knowledge. Additionally, they should be familiar with cloud service providers such as AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure. A Release Manager coordinates the release process, ensures that there is a smooth release process, communicates with different teams, initiates and coordinates maintenance of the system. The Release Manager also develops procedures and collaborates with other teams to ensure there is adequate planning for future releases. A DevOps Engineer has a background in systems engineering or computer science.

pure devops team structure

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 responsibility. 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. Likewise, developers should be prepared to communicate with security engineers early and often to help design code that is secure from the start.

Beautifying our UI: Giving GitLab build features a fresh look

But, on a more pragmatic level, allowing developers and operators to access the same New Relic dashboard as a functional team enabled Yellow Pages to troubleshoot and test against production, he said. For example, the team would discover user problems and operate and monitor the system in production. When you view a stream-aligned team, they have no critical dependencies on any other team. As Jim Benson says in The Collaboration Equation, ‘individuals in teams create value’.

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.

Steps for Building a Successful DevOps Team Structure

A C4E supplements DevOps and agile efforts due to the collaborative team structure that it builds and the self-reliant and productive environment that it creates. This team structure assumes that development and operations sit together and operate on a singular team – acting as a united front with shared goals. Occasionally called “NoOps”, this is commonly seen in technology companies with a single, primary digital product, like Facebook or Netflix.

pure devops team structure

At the core of the DevOps Engineer’s role is infrastructure automation, which allows the team to scale efficiently, optimize resource utilization, and reduce downtime. They must have expertise in configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet to implement and manage infrastructure as code (IaC) efficiently. This role is responsible for building and maintaining the team’s infrastructure and ensuring that applications are running smoothly in the environment. DevOps Engineers must have experience in server management, automation tools, and scripting languages.

Application Modernization Strategy: The Key Factors

DEV Community — A constructive and inclusive social network for software developers. With the ability to create separate virtual clusters within a Kubernetes cluster, namespaces offer a powerful solution. In addition, the Security Manager is responsible for implementing security policies, managing access control, evaluating, and approving security tools used by the DevOps team. Dig deeper into DevOps job titles, roles, and responsibilities, the next article in our DevOps Guide. However, the risk with small teams means that getting all the required expertise might be a challenge, and loss of a team member might significantly impair the team’s throughput. 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.

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. Management consultant Matthew Skelton writes about a number of different DevOps scenarios in great detail, but we’ll discuss just a few of the silos he mentions specifically and how they impact an organization. Operational features and metrics
Monitoring
Resources provisioning
Handling communications with an IaaS team (optional).

The Great Testing Transition

It is responsible for the DevOps aspects of the teams’ products or projects. Its goal is to improve collaboration and automate the software delivery process for faster, more reliable updates. Each organization has different DevOps requirements and each organization has a different perspective towards DevOps. With a lack of standards and policies, organizations should take extra care in preparing and implementing a DevOps team structure and strategy in the organization. Monolithic architectures that build a massive application as a single entity ruled the software landscape for years.

  • While many organizations focus on tools and technologies, people and culture are ignored.
  • Organizations like this still see ops as something that supports the initiatives for software development, not something with value in itself.
  • Technology advances from multicloud to microservices and containers also play a role when it comes to defining the right DevOps team structure.
  • Automatic scripts that can be executed at the granular level to facilitate flexible customization of exceptions and modes.
  • By linking tickets to corresponding releases or changes, you can reduce errors and build apps faster.

SRE practices are commonly found in DevOps teams, regardless of if they formally adopt them. DORA’s research has found reliability unlocks the effect of software delivery performance on organizational outcomes. Platform Engineering is often found alongside DevOps and has a strong link with software delivery performance. It intersects with team topologies, as platform teams have many ‘as-a-service’ interactions with the other team types. In all cases, the DevOps research and modelling covers leadership, culture, and technical practices.

DevOps Department Structure 6: DevOps / SRE (Google model)

From that experience, he identified a few key things for enterprises to consider when thinking about DevOps. “No matter how good you are, you’ll never be able to fully mimic production,” Gaeremynck said. When Yellow Pages experienced a slowdown, developers launched a profiling session against their production systems and examined which parts of the code were taking the longest to execute. Steve Fenton is an Octonaut at Octopus Deploy and a six-time Microsoft MVP with more than two decades of experience in software delivery. The Accelerate State of DevOps Report shows that you commonly find Platform Engineering teams in high-performance organizations.