5 key organizational models for DevOps teams GitLab


By monitoring these KPIs, organizations can gauge the success of their efforts to break down silos and make informed decisions about how to further optimize their DevOps culture and processes. In this section, we will discuss the critical components of a DevOps culture, including shared ownership, trust, and a commitment to continuous improvement. We will also examine real-world case studies that demonstrate the benefits of adopting a DevOps mindset. It’s important to have the right people and platform in place before implementing it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with automated processes that aren’t worth much, if anything at all. Make sure to take time to plan how your team will work together – who takes on what responsibilities, etc.

devops organization structure

Finding the pain points and bottlenecks in your organization and identifying their causes will give your DevOps teams a focus towards which they can direct their efforts. Finding opportunities where automation can speed up production and reduce confusion will vastly increase productivity across your entire organization. While identifying opportunities, make sure you don’t go overboard and try to automate processes that you will spend more time automating than the time you would save from that automation. DevOps and Agile roles are important aspects within each team to help ensure members own the process as well as their contributions to the projects. Using rotating roles will also help team members to better understand the entire process so they can make informed decisions regarding process changes in the future.

Jira Product Discovery

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 Engineering teams in high-performance organizations. This doesn’t mean putting people together if they will regularly share information. It’s easy to create a team with all the needed skills by hiring many people, but the team won’t have resilience as each member handles a small, isolated area. A professional manager’s job is to build a team with a strong mix of skills with overlap while keeping the team as small as possible.

devops organization structure

We also have other functional DevOps groups besides “Dev” that manage other aspects of our product. Here at Atlassian, platform teams build services used by all of our products (like identity management) and are expected to provide documentation, support, and consultation for stream-aligned teams. Because stream-aligned teams work on the full spectrum of delivery, they are, by necessity, closer to the customer and usually already agile.

Docker Production Deployment Security Considerations

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. 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. 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.

Then they become their own silo, making sure the uneducated masses don’t spoil their new utopia. This one may seem pretty obvious as an anti-pattern, but many organizations that try to adopt DevOps try to do so without breaking down the barriers between the groups. It is hard to do that when team members are reporting to different departments, being measured on different criteria, and working towards different goals. 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.

Why you need a security champions program

The rise of cloud, SaaS, and always-on services means that customers expect new features, fewer bugs, and 99.99% (or higher) up-time. Taking an example from Spotify, the business teams are called squads, who handle specific services (e.g., search, playlist, player etc.). They sit together and act as a mini-startup, incorporating every component required to support a service throughout its lifecycle. In this model, a single team has shared goals with no separate functions.

Platform teams work with development teams to create one or more golden pathways. These pathways don’t prevent teams from using something else but offer supported self-service products that help teams improve delivery capability. The understanding each team member brings from their discipline will reduce the need for handoffs and will make sure problems are found sooner or prevented altogether. So having teams that collaborate with some or significant levels of cooperation are the teams that will most likely succeed. In conclusion, code mapping is a powerful practice that can greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of DevOps teams. Before hiring a DevOps engineer, assess your business requirements and prepare a hiring strategy.

Get started with DevOps

Most importantly, commitment and buy-in from every member are also important. DevOps requires sys admins who are competent in IT operations, but ideally, they are more than that. They understand the software development process workflows and can collaborate with developers to reduce the friction that occurs when developers hand off code for deployment. Throughout this post, we have explored the transformative potential of DevOps culture and its impact on organizational structure.

  • According to a 2016 Puppet State of DevOps report, high-performing organizations with cross-functional teams are “2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work.”
  • A platform team acts like an enabling team that packages the knowledge into a self-service offering.
  • By optimizing a product, platform teams minimize resources and cognitive loads of the stream-aligned team.
  • It requires breaking down silos in order to collaborate throughout the product lifecycle.
  • Different rules should be implemented at different stages of development.
  • Scaling DevOps across the organization also necessitates promoting a DevOps mindset throughout the company.

The benefits of DevOps include faster and easier releases, team efficiency, increased security, higher quality products, and consequently happier teams and customers. You can only assess their current state relative to how things were before. If an organization achieves these goals, it’s irrelevant that it looks like an anti-pattern from the outside.

3.5 Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches

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 devops team structure 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 organization structure

And finally, when your team becomes advanced practitioners, incorporate observability to ensure you’re monitoring, measuring, and improving on the right things. Is your team quick to change direction based on feedback (customer or internal) from the latest changes? Mature DevOps processes include automated testing to ensure quality code shipments.

Ops as a platform

In order to scale DevOps effectively, it is vital to establish a DevOps leadership team that drives and supports the adoption of DevOps practices throughout the organization. This team can consist of senior leaders, managers, and experienced DevOps practitioners who work together to ensure that the organization’s DevOps transformation aligns with its overall strategic objectives. Every DevOps organization has a strong culture of trust and cross-team collaboration. That means team members need to check their egos at the door, share information freely with others on the team, and work together without regard for hierarchical titles or status.

Is a continuous planning process in DevOps worth it? – TechTarget

Is a continuous planning process in DevOps worth it?.

Posted: Fri, 13 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]


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