DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

The controlled experiments have also proven that when an organization of 6 teams was asked to build a software, their teams came up with an architecture of 6 layers. When another organization with 3 teams was asked to build the very same software, they came up with an architecture of 3 layers. Another tried and true method of sharing that most people have heard of is the concept of a lunch and learn, in which team members present on a topic, usually focusing on a success from a current or previous project. An alternative to the lunch and learn is where a project team would present on an issue currently experienced in an active project. The lunch and troubleshoot model would pull in individuals from other project teams who may have the expertise to ultimately resolve the issue.

Different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. Without a clear understanding of DevOps and how to properly implement it, a DevOps transformation is usually constrained to reorganizations or the latest tools. Properly embracing DevOps entails a cultural change where teams have new structures, new management principles, and adopt certain technology tools. Traditional organizational charts arrange resources according to expertise.

You should encourage and enable them to continuously build new skills. This goes against more traditional business approaches where specialization is all important. But if specialization doesn’t always lead to better quality products, then it is important to rethink how things get built. The designer doesn’t feel the pain of having to maintain what was designed, so designs don’t get better. Naturally, once you get your DevOps team going you’ll want to track their effectiveness and the best way of doing it is by looking at KPIs, key performance indicators. These can give you ideas on how to make processes run smoother and remove friction from within the team.

Because industry successes with DevOps are now evident, they want to “do DevOps” as well. Unfortunately, instead of reflecting on the gaps in the current structure and relationships, they take the elusive path of hiring “DevOps engineers” for their Ops team. Each business unit within your company gets its own organization in Azure DevOps, along with its own Azure AD tenant. You can set up projects within those individual organizations, as required, based on teams or ongoing work. The following image displays a sample of how “your company” could structure its organizations, projects, work items, teams, and repos.

Customer Service

Importantly, the DevOps evangelist is the individual who is genuinely concerned about DevOps advantages for the team, and even the organization in its entirety. In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback relating to this course, feel free to contact us There is something about those terms that give a sense of team and unity.

This player beats the drums, informs and moves the culture needle and should be full of drive, passion, and enthusiasm. If this player loses a few times, they should also be ready like the good old Humpty Dumpty to pick themselves back up and go straight back into the great fight. Without their vision, passion, and willingness to fail, there would be no drive for Continuous Improvement. In order for DevOps to embrace and excel within an organization, DevOps itself must be set up as a proper team to be able to achieve its goals and all the goals expected by others. It’s important that it becomes a high functioning team that is bereft of the old school Software philosophy of Silos. DevOps must ensure it does not bring that old mantra back by creating silos.

These detail-oriented specialists are also in charge of the building and implementation of inspection activities along with the apprehension and resolution of defects. A DevOps Architect is in charge of the design and implementation of enterprise apps. The DevOps Architect is also responsible for analyzing, implementing, and streamlining DevOps practices, monitoring technical operations as well as automating and facilitating processes. Since the DevOps team structure calls for rethinking and advancing existing cycles and advancement tasks, there’s a pattern towards improved efficiencies.

A new normal for DevOps teams

Shana is a product marketer passionate about DevOps and what it means for teams of all shapes and sizes. She loves understanding the challenges software teams face, and building content solutions that help address those challenges. If she’s not at work, she’s likely wandering the aisles of her local Trader Joes, strolling around Golden Gate, or grabbing a beer with friends.

Traditional development is not compelling since it doesn’t presuppose scaling. Besides, it has restricting methods of devops organizational structure reasoning which hinder collaboration. As innovation business keeps on developing, greater adaptability is required.

DevOps IT Org Chart

As a result, Cox Automotive was able to go from 2-month cycles to 2-week sprints, delivering MVP and enabling iteration with business partners in each sprint. After assembling the necessary resources for the DevOps team structure, organizations must avoid jumping into implementing DevOps practices. This means that the business requirements of the organization and the overall company vision must correspond with the objectives of the DevOps team. Probably the most popular approach to building a DevOps team is to “embed” the DevOps team within a larger team.

• Continuous delivery is a development practice where the created software can be released to production at any time.
• Ops as IaaS works best for “cloud-ready” companies using AWS , Azure or another cloud services provider.
• Crafting an eye catching presentation has never been more straightforward.
• You should only hire team members who are eager to learn and grow regardless their effective level of knowhow and experience.
• No amount of perfect finagling will overcome the shortfalls of a bad organizational culture.

In a serverless architecture, you host required functions, scale them and deliver them over the cloud without architecture responsibilities. Similarly, cloud architecture is about creating a cloud platform by integrating individual technologies. It is not just abstracting hardware capabilities but also involves other processes such as automation, orchestration, APIs, containerization, security, routing, UX design, etc. Public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud are a few examples of popular cloud architectures. DevOps augmented by cloud technology enables you to build highly scalable and flexible applications using different architectures such as Microservices, serverless architecture, and cloud architecture.

Common responsibilities of DevOps Teams (DevOps Responsibilities)

DevOps teams are made up of people who are skilled in both development and operations. There are different structures for teams based on the needs of the organization, but most teams in larger organizations or teams consist of 5-10 individuals. In conclusion, we hope this article has greatly enlightened you on the relevance of DevOps team structure in success-driven organizations.

However, doing so in a project or product-driven way means those items are subject to resource constraints and re-prioritizations which lead to subpar approaches and half-baked solutions. Even if you have many teams working on hundreds of different applications and software projects, you can manage them within a single project in Azure DevOps. However, if you want to manage more granular security between your software projects and their teams, consider using many projects. At the highest level of isolation is an organization, where each organization is connected to a single Azure AD tenant. A single Azure AD tenant, however, can be connected to many Azure DevOps organizations.

In order to bridge the Dev-DBA chasm, some organisations have experimented with something like Type 9, where a database capability from the DBA team is complimented with a database capability from the Dev team. This seems to help to translate between the Dev-centric view of databases and the DBA-centric view of databases . The DevOps Team with an Expiry Date looks substantially like Anti-Type B , but its intent and longevity are quite different. This temporary team has a mission to bring Dev and Ops closer together, ideally towards a Type 1 or Type 2 model, and eventually make itself obsolete.

DevOps Responsibilities: Continuous Monitoring

I have seen shared databases of retrospectives leveraged not only to help onboard new team members but queried regularly as a first time in overcoming roadblocks or root causes analysis. If the organization is undergoing a massive reorganization aimed at eliminating the hierarchical structure, this can lead to certain problems. In such organizations, it is necessary to control the balance between the benefits for the organization as a whole and the damage to the morale of employees. Type 2 of DevOps organizational structure can also be called “NoOps” because there is no separate or visible Ops command in this model .

How to create a successful DevOps organizational structure

Release managers are responsible for managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling the software dev process through different phases and environments. DevOps as a culture stresses that the cooperation and communication of devs and IT specialists is a dependency of the release cycle. Therefore, release managers play a huge role as discipline holders in a crew.

Related Resources

The main drawback here is a possible decrease in software quality during the implementation of new changes. The previous steps establish the team structure necessary to start the DevOps journey. In this third phase, organizations begin implementing DevOps practices––from continuous integration and delivery to automated testing and continuous deployment.

The trade-off for the high investment that this model demands is organizations get a team that makes DevOps its sole priority. Then they become their own silo, making sure the uneducated masses don’t spoil their new utopia. The Solution Architect figures out how the requirements will be designed in line with the organization’s environment and existing systems. The Product Owner manages the interaction with the customer to understand the requirements and work with the rest of the team to prioritize their delivery and incorporate feedback. Many organizations struggle to manage their vast collection of AWS accounts, but Control Tower can help.

Best Practices to succeed as a DevOps Team

DevOps does not of course suggest you to break and reorganize all ongoing projects at your organization in one go. A non-disruptive, but still impactful way of adapting your teams for DevOps methodology is to inject functional experts into projects teams. 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. In this configuration, the DevOps team is responsible for all aspects of the software delivery process, including development, testing, and operations.