How to create a successful DevOps organizational structure

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Once DevOps starts gaining traction within the organization, the tools and processes to support it will become mission-critical software. Teams will begin to rely on the DevOps pipelines to deliver to production. At this point in the DevOps maturity, the tools and processes need to be built, maintained, and operated like a product.

DevOps Team Structure

The critical aspect of the process is the path to get to your final organisation structure. What I want to do here is I want to take your business analyst and not make them THE product manager. I want to pair them with somebody from the business, because if you don’t pair them with somebody from the business, then you’re still throwing things over the wall. Make them part of the product management team, though, they’re now responsible for the scope themselves. I’m going to bring another organization into the picture here, and that’s the business.

• The DevOps engineer is usually a “jack of all trades” who has knowledge and experience with both development and operations.
• For workers, re-orgs, like introducing matrix management, can bring a lot of fear and worry.
• However, there is the backbone to change that we need to start with — finding the right team structure.
• If you approach a reorganization with openness and flexibility, you send the message that you’re willing to listen and give your team autonomy — a basic tenet of DevOps.

The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches. 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.

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The team works optimally as one unit and does not split into separate teams to address work concerns. The team is autonomous within set boundaries and is aligned to other teams through a clear vision and goal definition therefore is interdependent on others. The Inverse Conway Manoeuvre proposes intentionally influencing the team configuration to obtain a certain architecture in the system. High level of cohesion that each component of the system has a well-defined set of responsibilities and its internal elements are closely related and integrated. Some older products that we have may only be in standard format, but they can easily be converted to widescreen.

The major risk here is that, without assigning primary responsibility for DevOps to anyone in particular, there’s a chance that no one will actually do DevOps. But for smaller organizations that enjoy strong cultures of shared responsibility and collaborative models, this approach may be the simplest and most efficient way to implement DevOps. What team structure is right for DevOps to flourish in your organization? Here’s a look at the pros and cons of the most common DevOps team models. Shana is a product marketer passionate about DevOps and what it means for teams of all shapes and sizes.

In order to realize the full potential of DevOps, it is insufficient to only aim for better engineering techniques and greater automation, hard as that may be in itself. One of the implications of DevOps is a merger of development and corresponding operations teams into several build-it-and-run-it teams. This calls for a re-org at the typical tech organization that supports an old-guard business.

Maybe that person can switch into a more ops-focused role in your new organization. Wouldn’t you be loyal to an organization that took a risk on you? In particular, it looks at ways in which different team topologies can evolve with technological and organizational maturity. Periods of technical and product discovery typically require a highly collaborative environment to succeed. But keeping the same structures when discovery is over can lead to wasted effort and misunderstandings.

DevOps Team Topologies

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. In opposition to the anti-types, we can look at some topologies in which DevOps can be made to work. This is the classic ‘throw it over the wall’ split between Dev and Ops. It’s useful to look at some bad practices, what we might call ‘anti-types’ (after the ubiquitous ‘anti-pattern‘).

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. A DevOps engineer is an innovative position that is still evolving. The DevOps engineer is usually a “jack of all trades” who has knowledge and experience with both development and operations.

By team size

What we’ve had in the past, you’ll notice there under enterprise architecture, are business analysts. Business analysts have generally been in the business of taking the requirements from the business, and translating them into something that they can start to launch the rest of the IT process. But we have that https://globalcloudteam.com/ team that’s responsible for providing those services as a part of the platform substrate. Even if you’re using GCP, or Azure, or EC2, or any of the AWS capabilities, you have quotas. Yes, it’s very simple to get more, but you have that contract with AWS that says here’s the amount of capacity that I need.

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. This topology is borne of a combination of naivety and arrogance from developers and development managers, particularly when starting on new projects or systems. 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.

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If each project is using a different process or iteration schedule, it can make communication and collaboration difficult if the taxonomies aren’t the same. 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. The Security and Compliance Engineer is responsible for the overall security of the DevOps environment.

Common DevOps Team Roles

Making changes in the pipeline to improve the processes or even just to update to tools to stay current will no longer be something that can be done whenever one team feels like it. Because if something breaks, all teams will be unable to deliver software. The role of the DevOps evangelist is to remove silos between the development and operations teams. They determine the role and responsibilities of various team members and ensure that they’re well-trained to get the job done. The evangelist also ensures that the product is released frequently and is highly available to the end-user by ensuring that DevOps procedures, such as CI/CD, are being followed. DevOps is generally seen as a combination of development and operations where both teams work cohesively and collaborate with each other.

By exploring the strengths and weaknesses of these team structures (or ‘topologies’), we can identify the team structure which might work best for DevOps practices in our own organisations, taking into account Conway’s Law. Implementation of Type 1 requires significant organizational changes and a high level of competence in the management of the organization. Dev and Ops should have a clearly articulated, devops org chart clear, and understandable common goal and DevOps team structure (for example, “Deliver reliable and frequent SOFTWARE changes”). The following image displays a sample of how « your company » could structure its organizations, projects, work items, teams, and repos. If the products stored in multiple repos work on independent schedules or processes, you can split them into multiple projects.

This team structure, popularized by Google, is where a development team hands off a product to the Site Reliability Engineering team, who actually runs the software. In this model, development teams provide logs and other artifacts to the SRE team to prove their software meets a sufficient standard for support from the SRE team. Development and SRE teams collaborate on operational criteria and SRE teams are empowered to ask developers to improve their code before production. The technological innovations of recent years for software production and development (the cloud, containers, serverless, etc.) have improved the work and sped up the delivery of value to customers.

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This helps eliminate the siloed team problem that arises where everyone does their own thing with different tools and processes. Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating. Together with awareness of Conway’s law, team cognitive load, and how to become a sensing organization, Team Topologies results in an effective and humanistic approach to building and running software systems. One final thing that I want to add into this picture is that enterprise architecture is not the only organization that I’m suggesting that stays together as an organization and is then paired into the product teams. Other organizations like that would be things like information security. You all have these types of enterprise applications in your organization, and we have to continually deal with them.

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. Thirdly, the cloud migration team works at the data level, securely migrating system data and application data to the cloud environment. When it comes to DevOps responsibilities, a DevOps architect prepares the infrastructure, designs a plan, and offers guidelines to build relevant processes. The DevOps engineer implements this plan to design and automate DevOps processes using the right tool stack and infrastructure as code techniques for the specific environment. The implementation of these tools will again be monitored by the DevOps architect across the product lifecycle.