DevOps Team: Roles and Responsibilities Explained

In simple words, it is focused on automating all tasks end to end, instead of doing them manually. All the knowledge and expertise of system administrators and operations teams is packed into various programs and apps that carry out all these tasks. Infrastructure as Code, or IAS, is a concept that makes use of such apps as Terraform, Puppet, or Ansible. A 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. This is a form of Anti-Type A which is prominent in medium-to-large companies where multiple legacy systems depend on the same core set of data.

If you keep the team isolated for too long, you risk going down a slippery slope from rapid growth to embedded silo. For smaller engineering organizations, aligning functional teams is a solid choice. Even as a first step, this alignment can reinforce the positive changes you’ve made so far. Ensure that each person on both teams not only intellectually understands the other team’s role and constraints but also empathizes with the pain points. Where operations people have been fully embedded within product development teams, we see a Type 2 topology. There is so little separation between Dev and Ops that all people are highly focused on a shared purpose; this is arguable a form of Type 1, but it has some special features.

DevOps Team Structure | Roles & Responsibilities

An organization that communicates like this will inevitably build a structure that operates in much the same way,” the company wrote. The Automation Architect is essential to a DevOps team because DevOps is all about automating systems. It’s the Automation Architect’s responsibility to create processes that use automation to help reduce manual tasks. They are responsible for creating a more efficient process and finding the right tools to use and integrate within a DevOps model. Ironically, sometimes you stumble across good practice and a semblance of good practice, “purely by accident, in my case”, it’s the same with what I would consider a good DevOps team structure. I am not alone with this thinking, as numerous blogs and attachments to this article will testify to the same ilk.

Overall, they ensure that the product stays secure every step of the way. DevOps is generally seen as a combination of development and operations where both teams work cohesively and collaborate with each other. This is the foundation of DevOps and leads to clear benefits including the ability of software development teams to build, test, and ship the code faster and more reliably. That said, every DevOps team, no matter which form it takes, should include engineers who are skilled in both software development and IT operations. The core purpose of DevOps is to bridge the gap separating these two disciplines.

Tribes share industry knowledge, provide sound feedback, and support career growth. Provide time for your engineers to learn from people with whom they share education, experience, and goals. The downside of a cross-functional product team is that engineers lose the camaraderie of engineers with their same skill sets and passions. Having a group of like-minded individuals with whom you can socialize and from whom you can learn is an important aspect of job satisfaction. The benefits of this DevOps approach is having a dedicated team to address major infrastructure changes or adjustments. If you’re struggling with operations-centered issues that are slowing down your deployments or causing site reliability concerns, this might be a good approach — even temporarily.

Create a hiring strategy based on industry trends, technological analysis, and business requirements. Prepare a structured process management system with a streamlined interview process and onboard mechanisms, and execute it to hire the right people for the right jobs, at the right time. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) sits at the heart of DevOps. This pipeline comprises integrated processes required to automate build, test, and deployment.

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.

What Team Structure is Right for DevOps to Flourish?

This process left operations teams carrying most of the responsibility over the code with little guidance from development once it’s been handed off. Not only did this mean lengthy backlogs and slower time to market, but it also did little to help build a trusting and collaborative relationship between development and operations. A successful DevOps team is cross-functional, with members that represent the business, development, quality assurance, operations, and anyone else devops team structure involved in delivering the software. Ideally, team members have shared goals and values, collaborate continuously, and have unified processes and tooling. They are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the product, from gathering requirements, to building and testing the software, to delivering it into production, and monitoring and maintaining the software in production. DevOps teams comprise professionals from development, quality, security, and the operations segment.

• In DevOps, developers will also take on-call responsibilities in case of application/infrastructure emergencies.
• A DevOps engineer is responsible for designing the right infrastructure required for teams to continuously build and deliver products.
• These teams work together to ensure that the assets the team creates are consumable, consumed broadly, and fully leveraged across the organization.
• Dev and Ops Collaboration is one of the most common team structures and best practices in DevOps.
• When we talk about bringing teams to work together, that’s on the People pillar.

If the developers are handling DevOps, then we can get rid of Ops entirely, right? Getting rid of Operations entirely just means someone else will be taking on their workload, only Ops probably isn’t something they are good at or familiar with. Electronic Health Records have become a major cornerstone of the modern health system and a must-have for any medical organization. Learn about Epic and Cerner EHR, two major vendors, and which one to choose for your health information management project. Read about the potential of Smart EMR and learn how this cutting-edge solution can transform how healthcare providers work. All components needed to run an application are packaged as a single image and can be reused.

How to Construct the Ideal DevOps Team Structure

He would design the scripts that the team would be using while developing, testing, and monitoring the application. Application monitoring ensures that the DevOps-related teams are well aware of all the performance problems such as slow reaction and memory leaks. The issues might be uncovered during application server checking, user experience observing, and so on.

It’s not all about the players, but sometimes about what the team stands for. CA, The Automation Architect, generally focuses on the Continuous Testing CT and CA side of the house and ensures that there is a strong sense and semblance of test and the ability to test and report with speed. The more we automate and get back to the community, the better they can respond with fixes or information. Without a shadow of a doubt this piece can resemble both the King and Queen on a chessboard as its functions and performs at the highest level, it is the most important piece and generally your weapon of choice when the need arises. This player beats the drums, informs and moves the culture needle and should be full of drive, passion, and enthusiasm.

There is so little separation between Dev and Ops that all people are highly focused on a shared purpose; this is arguable a form of Type 1 , but it has some special features. This anti-type is typical in organizations with low engineering maturity. They want to improve their practices and reduce costs, yet they fail to see IT as a core driver of the business. Because industry successes with DevOps are now evident, they want to “do DevOps” as well.

Step 3:  Adopting Suitable Tools for the DevOps Team Structure

DevOps is an innovative methodology that offers a set of practices that brings development and operations teams together to collaborate seamlessly and continuously deliver quality products faster and better. 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.

The gaps should be investigated for essential technical competence or jobs that need to be replaced, and the types of personalities the leader believes could help a team integrate. A pillar of DevOps is the use of operational metrics, benchmarks and features. Understanding the status of your product helps you identify issues and respond to them rapidly. DevOps relies on loosely-coupled service oriented architecture in which every DevOps team owns and operates one piece of your loosely-coupled architecture. In the future, such organizations will likely move on and adopt structure 1 or structure 3. Netflix and Facebook – companies developing one digital product – are prime examples of companies using and succeeding with this DevOps practice.

Cloud roadmap

The increased collaboration between developers and operations meant less time spent on escalations, and fewer issues to fix down the road. This meant more time could be spent on improving and innovating current products. It’s a model adopted by every big company out there, that seeks to move fast and be agile, and focuses on security by following DevSecOps practices.

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The code describes, manages, and converges the desired state of a machine or the infrastructure. While you avoid documentation, seamless collaboration becomes a reality. Based on the business requirements, the software developer starts to write code in order to develop the final product.

Organization structure will drive team communication and goals due to Conway’s Law. Making sure the team members have common goals is critical to shared success, and therefore breaking down organizational silos is critical to DevOps success. You cannot have team members in a siloed organization try to work together without removing the barriers that keep their responsibilities separate. These DevOps teams need to be inclusive, bring other teams into the culture of DevOps and show them by example how shared responsibilities and a collaborative culture helps the project and the organization as a whole.

Tip– DevOps requires CIOs, CTOs, and other C-suite to champion the cause of adoption of DevOps and scaling it up to the enterprise level. 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. Basically, it is the duty of the release manager to coordinate, supervise and manage the project right from the development stage through the production stage. Representation of DevOps Team StructureIn case you are doubting the relevance of DevOps team structure, here are some accurate and reliable statistics that will most likely change your mind. For starters, do you know that DevOps spends 60% less time handling support cases?

They can easily take up the role in database management to resource management, development to security to support. It is important that you choose the DevOps team with varied skillset who can easily fit into different roles like system admins who can start working on the code or the developers who can start coding itself. There are a lot of tools in DevOps that can help devops engineers with Configuration Management, Test-and Build systems, Application Deployment, Collaboration, and Communication and Monitoring. The successful model we’ve seen is to develop a pipeline for your pipeline. Treat the tools and processes as a project, probably maintained by a team that can focus on the pipeline as a product.