DevOps Team Structure BMC Software Blogs

As such, developers are not concerned about stability while operations teams don’t like frequent changes to code. Now, every member of the cross-functional team will take equal responsibility at every stage of the product lifecycle. A DevOps engineer is responsible for designing the right infrastructure required for teams to continuously build and deliver products. The engineer identifies project requirements and KPIs and customizes the tool stack.

You can use DevOps PATHS to detect common accidental team structures to fix and avoid long-term problems. As Jim Benson says in The Collaboration Equation, ‘individuals in teams create value’. Individual skill combined with collaboration is where great things happen. Underperforming teams happen when you don’t build in the need for people to work together to unlock their unique talents.

DevOps Team Structure: What Are the Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

This is when DevOps transformation begins in the new cloud environment. Under the guidance of the DevOps architects, DevOps engineers build DevOps processes such as CI/CD pipelines along with a continuous monitoring loop using a customized tool stack to begin operations in a phased manner. 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.

It only happens when everyone imbibes this change, practices, and evangelizes the concept. 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.

Common SRE paths

Trust will be crucial to letting these teams organize themselves and learn what is effective and what needs more effective implementation next time, but that’s the price of doing business. DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.

• DevOps is a cultural shift that fosters collaboration between those who build and maintain software.
• When used together, agile and DevOps result in high efficiency and reliability.
• Despite appearing to flow sequentially, the loop symbolizes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire lifecycle.
• With this approach, you would have a number of small-sized teams (3-4 people) all working together on the same domain object.

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 devops team structure Engineering teams in high-performance organizations. Enabling teams are helpful as a part of a scaling strategy, as stream-aligned teams are often too busy to research and prototype new tools and technology.

How to adopt DevOps

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. Stream-aligned teams are under constant pressure to deliver and respond to change quickly, making it challenging to find time for researching, learning, and practicing new skills. The goal of this team is to reduce the load of stream-aligned teams who work on systems that include or use the subsystem. With the complicated-subsystem team’s expertise and capabilities, stream-aligned teams don’t have to build capabilities in areas too complicated for their daily work. Team members from this team may have specialized knowledge in certain microservices (i.e. a billing service), algorithms, or even artificial intelligence.

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. When a software team is on the path to practicing DevOps, it’s important to understand that different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change.

Jira Software

The code describes, manages, and converges the desired state of a machine or the infrastructure. While you avoid documentation, seamless collaboration becomes a reality. 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. 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.

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. A solid DevOps platform needs a solid DevOps team structure to achieve maximum efficiency. DevOps doesn’t work without automation and for many teams, automation is the top priority.

Fundamentals of DevOps Teams

Your SRE organization may follow the implementations in the order above. Another common path is to implement what’s described in “Before you begin,” then to staff a Kitchen Sink SRE team, but swap the order of Infrastructure with product/application when it is time to start a second SRE team. In this scenario, the result is two specialized product/application SRE teams. This makes sense when there is enough product/application breadth but little to no shared infrastructure between both teams, other than hosted solutions such as the ones provided by Google Cloud. 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.

We’ve also observed software development to be an effective tool for balancing these approaches. Once they see the benefits (typically time savings) that they can achieve by using that system, development teams are influenced to adopt the practices through the provided tooling. As adoption of such a system grows, the approach can then shift to target improvements for SREs and set mandates through reliability-related conformance tests. 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.

Key characteristics of a successful DevOps team

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. In the future, such organizations will likely move on and adopt structure 1 or structure 3. Overall, the leader of a DevOps team should be a skilled and experienced technical professional with strong leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. We are using system design terminology to refer to DevOps team modalities because it is only an abstraction intended to capture a human resource use case for today’s tech companies. DevOps has been particularly influential in the cloud computing and web development communities, but it is also used in various other contexts.

If your team uses Github, you can learn more about this Github integration to see how to set this up for your team. When we talk about bringing teams to work together, that’s on the People pillar. Breaking the routine of going to the same office as the rest of your team can be tricky and requires a strong distributed team, the right tools, and lots of training. When it started to really get traction as a concept, almost 10 years ago, DevOps was primarily used to push rapid changes to web environments with minimal impact on the users. 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. You can use DevOps PATHS and Team Topologies to inform your team design.

DevOps Roles: Release Manager

If you’re just getting started with DevOps, there are several team organizational models to consider. If you are just starting your SRE practice, we recommend reading Do you have an SRE team yet? How to start and assess your journey, and then assessing the SRE implementation that best suits your needs based on the information we shared above.