8 Characteristics Of Our Devops Organization

IT support is another important team that should be integrated into the DevOps lifecycle. It should be automated to match the speed and scale of agile development. When developers push code to production, they can convey known errors to the support team. Similarly, Kbs related to incidents and problems should be communicated to all members so that everyone is educated about issues and incidents. As with the development and operations teams that have opposite objectives, development and security operations have conflicting objectives too. Traditionally, development teams and operation teams focus on policy management, code inspection, etc., and security teams retroactively monitor and mitigate risks.

Right from the build, test, deployment, and monitoring of a product, the engineer integrates all resources and functions required at every stage of the product lifecycle while protecting the cloud architecture from hacking attacks. In addition, the engineer is involved in team composition, project activities, defining and setting the processes for CI/CD pipelines and external interfaces. The responsibility of a DevOps architect is to analyse existing software development processes and create an optimized DevOps CI/CD pipeline to rapidly build and deliver software. The architect analyses existing processes and implement best practices to streamline and automate processes using the right tools and technologies. In addition, he monitors and manages technical operations, collaborates with dev and ops, and offers support when required.

We likely all know this topology is bad, but I think there are actually worse topologies; at least with Anti-Type A , we know there is a problem. It’s useful to look at some bad practices, what we might call ‘anti-types’ (after the ubiquitous ‘anti-pattern‘). Most of these DevOps topologies have been described elsewhere before; in particular, Lawrence Sweeney of CollabNet goes into useful detail in a comment on Ben Kepes’s blog about what I characterise here as Anti-Type B , Type 3 , and Type 1 . The DevOpsGuys have a list of Twelve DevOps Anti-Patterns, and Jez Humble, Gene Kim, Damon Edwards have said similar things.

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 in a smarter way. It also brings consistency across the infrastructure and enables easy tracking of KPIs. As such, each team works independently and does not belong to any other team. The second is that structuring your DevOps team in the wrong way can cause long-lasting problems.

Monolithic architectures that build a massive application as a single entity ruled the software landscape for years. While this architecture offered stability, any changes to the application impacted the application as a whole. As the application grew, it got complex and hindered scalability. One of the major reasons why organizations fail when initiating a change is that culture is deeply rooted. Proper engagement with the team and influencing positivity across the organization is essential. In other words, rather than assigning DevOps responsibilities to any of your employees, you would work with an external business to add DevOps techniques and practices to your IT strategy.

Devops Responsibilities: Continuous Monitoring

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. In order to „become DevOps“ without losing current dev teams velocity , a DevOps team is set up to work on the tooling required for deployment https://globalcloudteam.com/ pipelines, configuration management, environment management, etc. Meanwhile Ops folks continue to work in isolation and Dev teams continue to throw them applications „over the wall“. On-call Incident management is not very different in DevOps environments. The only change is that developers are also involved in this process.

In PaaS, the entire application is hosted, scaled, and delivered. In a serverless architecture, you host required functions, scale them and deliver them over the cloud without architecture responsibilities. Continuous Delivery takes the applications and delivers them to selected infrastructures. Testing moves towards the left part of the CI/CD pipeline, wherein code is automatically tested before delivering it to production. By building an SRE team, then, businesses get something very similar to a stand-alone DevOps team that exists alongside development and IT operations.

Tools Should Be Implemented Individually In Teams

This topology is borne of a combination of naivety and arrogance from developers and development managers, particularly when starting on new projects or systems. The DevOps Team Silo (Anti-Type B) typically results from a manager or exec deciding that they “need a bit of this DevOps thing” and starting a ‘DevOps team’ (probably full of people known as ‘a DevOp‘). The members of the DevOps team quickly form another silo, keeping Dev and Ops further apart than ever as they defend their corner, skills, and toolset from the ‘clueless Devs’ and ‘dinosaur Ops’ people. Soft skills are the most important requirement in a DevOps team structure. Compared to technical skills, soft skills are harder to teach your employees. So, ensure that your employees are creative thinkers, team persons, communicate well and are ready to learn.

Henry Ford is a natural starting point for any discussion of modern organizational models. The framework of the modern global corporation can be traced back to Henry Ford with his assembly line, fed by highly specialized workers in the 1920s in America. Some say we can even go as far back as the East India Company or the Knights Templar. Business functions like marketing and finance are part of this structure as well. Obviously as teams continue to grow, they get carved up into disciplines, but the hierarchy remains as simplistic as possible.

• At this stage, a cross-functional DevOps team is formed with members from IT, operations, security, finance, and management that share the common responsibilities of DevOps to implement the cloud migration framework.
• In a traditional software development environment, developers and operations people have different objectives, incentives, and responsibilities.
• The extent, strength, and effectiveness of technical leadership; whether Dev and Ops have a shared goal.
• The product quality is also the sole responsibility of the Quality team.
• DevOps often recommends that Dev teams join the on-call rotation, but it’s not essential.
• In other words, rather than assigning DevOps responsibilities to any of your employees, you would work with an external business to add DevOps techniques and practices to your IT strategy.

The Security and Compliance Engineer is responsible for the overall security of the DevOps environment. The SCE closely works with the development teams to design and integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring devops organization structure data integrity and security are not compromised at every stage of the product lifecycle. In addition, the SCE ensures that the products being developed are adhering to governing regulations and compliance standards.

What Is Devops?

Large enterprises operate differently than agile web startups, whereDevOpswas born, and so their DevOps methodologies cannot match those startups. DevOps often recommends that Dev teams join the on-call rotation, but it’s not essential. In fact, some organisations run a different model, with an explicit ‚hand-off‘ from Development to the team that runs the software, the Site Reliability Engineering team. In this model, the Dev teams need to provide test evidence (logs, metrics, etc.) to the SRE team showing that their software is of a good enough standard to be supported by the SRE team. Within organisations that have a large gap between Dev and Ops , it can be effective to have a ‚facilitating‘ DevOps team that keeps the Dev and Ops sides talking. This is a version of Type 5 but where the DevOps team exists on an ongoing basis with the specific remit of facilitating collaboration and cooperation between Dev and Ops teams.

The leader should have a clear vision and articulate the vision across the team, drive intent, inspire, motivate and encourage everyone. Seamless collaboration and engagement help everyone not only to be motivated but align with organizational objectives. DevOps team structure plays a crucial role in fully leveraging DevOps benefits. As such, organizations should ensure that the team is built with the right people with a clear definition of DevOps roles and responsibilities. A somewhat radical approach to DevOps team structure is to avoid designating any specific engineers or team as DevOps specialists, and instead make DevOps a collective responsibility of every engineer. This article unpacks the reasons why structuring a DevOps team can be so difficult, explains the most common DevOps organizational models, and discusses what to consider when devising a DevOps team structure.

I prepared this course based on a lot of research and my own personal experience. I’ve been part of a DevOps culture for about two years with CenturyLink Cloud. 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. The IaaS topology trades some potential effectiveness for easier implementation, possibly deriving value more quickly than by trying for Type 1 which could be attempted at a later date. Of course, there are variations on the themes outlined here; the topologies and types are meant as a reference guide or heuristic for assessing which patterns might be appropriate. In reality, a combination of more than one pattern, or one pattern transforming into another, will often be the best approach.

Release managers are mostly Ops-focused wherein they design an automation pipeline for a smooth progression of code to production, monitor feedback, reports, and plan the next release, working in an endless loop. DevOps teams comprise professionals from development, quality, security, and the operations segment. As the core responsibility of the team would be on the person who owns the DevOps team, a senior person from the organization would be an ideal person to lead the team, referred to as a DevOps Evangelist. The DevOps evangelist will ensure that the responsibilities of DevOps processes are assigned to the right people. The smallest DevOps team should comprise the following people; A software developer/tester, automation engineer/automation expert, quality assurance professional, security engineer, and release manager. The granularity of the team ultimately depends on the size of the organization.

Devops Culture: Practice And Evangelize The Devops Culture Across The It Department

A majority of our Engineering resources not only work there, but physically sit together in big rooms with long tables. One of our developers can easily hit a support engineer with a Nerf bullet. Co-location makes our daily standups easier, problem resolution simpler, and builds camaraderie among the various teams that build and support our global cloud. Now, there are folks distributed around the globe that are part of this Engineering team.

As such, security has to be incorporated in the planning stage of development. 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.

DevOps’ advent has transformed the software development landscape, bringing cross-functional teams of developers, operations, and QA to seamlessly collaborate and deliver quality in an automated continuous delivery environment. 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 responsibilities. We wear custom t-shirts that say “Run by Robots” for crying out loud! The first step in cloud migration begins with discovering current IT infrastructure and assessing product capabilities, cloud readiness levels, and cloud requirements. Security, network, and data center management teams usually sit together on this task to prepare a cloud migration framework with well-written documentation. At this stage, a cross-functional DevOps team is formed with members from IT, operations, security, finance, and management that share the common responsibilities of DevOps to implement the cloud migration framework.

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. 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. Clearly, there is no magic conformation or team topology which will suit every organisation. However, it is useful to characterise a small number of different models for team structures, some of which suit certain organisations better than others.

Devops Roles: Security And Compliance Engineer

By removing unnecessary programs, accessible accounts, you can reduce threats. Customizing security rules above or beyond regular configurations is required. You need to implement more configuration settings when an application accepts logins and relax rules when updates and other modes of operations are going on. Different rules should be implemented at different stages of development. 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.

The Sre Approach

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. By allowing you to use a shared tool stack across processes, Microservices and DevOps go hand in hand to increase productivity. Microservices architecture increases scalability and reliability. Application development management, therefore, becomes efficient and easy.

In a traditional software development environment, developers and operations people have different objectives, incentives, and responsibilities. While developers are rewarded for the feature-set, operations receive incentives when the infrastructure is stable. As such, developers are not concerned about stability while operations teams don’t like frequent changes to code.

Teams collaboratively identify vulnerabilities and are prepared to efficiently handle incidents. With monitoring tools, continuous feedback, and alerting tools, teams detect and respond and resolve issues along with a post-mortem process. Information security has to be incorporated at the earliest in DevOps. With infrastructure as code increasingly gaining momentum, the thin line between development and operations is quickly waning off. The current DevOps team structure contains people who are skilled in coding and operations.

Common Roles In A Devops Team Devops Roles

Probably the most popular approach to building a DevOps team is to „embed“ the DevOps team within a larger team. The larger team is usually either the software development or IT operations team. DevOps methodology implementation is not a walk in the park for developers. Some of the developers may find it difficult to learn new tools and methodologies. Also, the developers may be afraid the onboarding time will influence their regular daily tasks. That is the reason why great DevOps engineers need to reduce objections and focus on the team members who find the adaptation more difficult.

The Challenge Of Devops Team Structure

My sense is that this Type 1 model needs quite substantial organisational change to establish it, and a good degree of competence higher up in the technical management team. Dev and Ops must have a clearly expressed and demonstrably effective shared goal (‘Delivering Reliable, Frequent Changes’, or whatever). Before hiring a DevOps engineer, assess your business requirements and prepare a hiring strategy. A DevOps engineer is skilled in development and operations and interacts with all team members. So, look for hard skills such as IT background, virtualization expertise, system build knowledge, etc. as well as soft skills such as communication, service-orientation, team person, and the value he offers to the organization.