DevOps Team: Roles and Responsibilities for 2022

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. Separate the development and maintenance work being performed on the pipeline from the production pipelines being used by the other teams. Moving from a legacy infrastructure to using Infrastructure as Code and microservices can offer faster development and innovation, but the increased operational workload can be challenging. It’s best to build out a strong foundation of automation, configuration management, and continuous delivery practices to help ease the load.

• Now virtual communication apps provide that same instantaneous communication.
• Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product.
• DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality.
• This can include a release manager who coordinates and manages applications from development through production, to automation architects who maintain and automate a team’s CI/CD pipeline.
• More importantly, it allows teams to “shift left” to earlier stages in development and minimize broken production changes.

One of the most fundamental challenges DevOps seeks to combat is the siloing of knowledge, experience, and work in different organizational units. When the programmers who write code and the system administrators who deploy and maintain it don’t communicate, you likely have inefficiencies. The high levels of autonomy and trust that are typical in a DevOps culture can be difficult to cultivate if there is a history of conflict between any of the individuals or teams involved. The more siloed the teams were before attempting to adopt a DevOps approach, the harder it will be to build connections. A grassroots effort can be, and often is, an important starting point for getting management and executive-level buy-in for a DevOps transformation.

Still, a team that wants to design a DevOps-friendly architecture should keep certain goals in mind. Ideally, your DevOps strategy is powered by developers who have two main traits. They know a variety of programming languages and are familiar with different app development strategies, such as Agile methodology. This flexibility helps your team to adjust and improve on a continuous basis. Bookmark these resources to learn about types of DevOps teams, or for ongoing updates about DevOps at Atlassian. 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 Service Management

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. DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value. DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

Atlassian’s Open DevOps provides everything teams need to develop and operate software. Teams can build the DevOps toolchain they want, thanks to integrations with leading vendors and marketplace apps. Because we believe teams should work the way they want, rather than the way vendors want. Another ingredient for success is a leader willing to evangelize DevOps to a team, collaborative teams, and the organization at large. As DevOps becomes more widespread, we often hear software teams are now DevOps teams.

The new team may include stakeholders from other domains, such as QA, or you can manage roles other than dev and ops as their own teams. This approach works well if you want to structure your entire organization around DevOps and never look back, but it requires major organizational overhaul. You also have to convince all of your developers and IT engineers to embrace a new identity as DevOps engineers, which may be culturally jarring.

Anti-Pattern #3: Dev, Ops, and DevOps Silos

Now virtual communication apps provide that same instantaneous communication. 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.

It also brings consistency across the infrastructure and enables easy tracking of KPIs. Developers have been chasing the dream of delivering software more frequently, with less effort, and fewer bugs for decades. Now, the tools and practices to make this a reality are finally here. In most cases, doing some variation of “trunk-based development” will vastly simplify your CI/CD effort.

But once DevOps has become mission critical, the tools and processes being developed and used must themselves be maintained and treated as a project, making a pipeline for your pipeline. If you really want teams to be able to have shared responsibilities, they need to have common goals. And the only way to share common goals is to make sure that they report to the same people and are measured on collective successes.

Development and operations collaboration

Build resiliency, redundancy and automated failover into system architectures; these features mitigate the disruptions caused by the inevitable failures that occur during CI/CD cycles. Knowing the ins and outs of configuration management is a plus as well. It’s important to understand that not every team shares the same goals, or will use the same practices and tools. Different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. A DevOps team at two companies may mean radically different things.

Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of this data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services. Microservices is an architectural technique where an application is built as a collection of smaller services that can be deployed and operated independently from each other. Each service has its own processes and communicates with other services through an interface. This separation of concerns and decoupled independent function allows for DevOps practices like continuous delivery and continuous integration. It is vital for every member of the organization to have access to the data they need to do their job as effectively and quickly as possible. Team members need to be alerted of failures in the deployment pipeline — whether systemic or due to failed tests — and receive timely updates on the health and performance of applications running in production.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are commonly believed to be necessary to a DevOps culture. A third process, continuous deployment, is embraced and promoted by such large organizations devops organization structure as Netflix but not commonly adopted in most smaller companies. So, unless your organization deploys many times a day it may not be worth investing in the processes that support this approach.

Enterprise services

And that usually means aligning the organizational structure with the desired team structure, as observed by the proverb known as Conway’s Law. Bringing DevOps to an organization means making some changes to the culture and structure of teams and the organization. These changes are often disruptive and frequently meet with some resistance from leadership, teams, and individuals. Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process.

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. As such, security has to be incorporated in the planning stage of development. 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. In the Build phase, a compilation of the application takes place using a version control system.

Outcomes can be improved when a team meets at the end of a sprint or project to discuss what went well and what could be improved, in an open and safe environment. This mindset is reflected in the past obsession with measuring “Mean Time Between Failures” over “Mean Time to Recovery” . MTBF uses tools like “root cause analysis” to identify the source of failures and attempt to prevent them from happening again. MTTR reflects a view of software applications as complex systems that are apt to fail in unpredictable ways and focuses on quick recovery when they do fail.

DevOps testing tutorials

While one on-call engineer responds to incidents, DevOps teams assign multiple people for escalations so that the on-call engineer can escalate it to the right person or team. Once the issue is resolved, teams analyze the system again to get prepared for future incidents. The Solution Architect figures out how the requirements will be designed in line with the organization’s environment and existing systems. Business System Teams who take full responsibility of the product lifecycle end-to-end, as well as managing business and end users. If the goal of the DevOps team is to make itself obsolete by bringing the other teams together then they can be effective as evangelists and coaches. Perhaps it is easiest to start with some examples of anti-patterns — structures that are almost always doomed to fail.

DevOps Culture: Practice and evangelize the DevOps culture across the IT department

While this architecture offered stability, any changes to the application impacted the application as a whole. 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. 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. Developers translate the design into code, and are involved in supporting the code through testing and deployment. Ensure the underlying infrastructure and platforms can effectively support the services through capacity and availability planning, monitoring, and optimization.

key DevOps roles and responsibilities for team success

When culture is deeply rooted in an organization, resistance to change is a big bottleneck. As DevOps is not just a tool or a technology, it is important to see a top-down cultural shift across the organization. Teams should break down silos and find a common ground to seamlessly communicate and collaborate. It should happen right from business perspectives to deployment and maintenance across all stakeholders, departments, and stages of development. With different tools, technologies, processes, and people, achieving this is a herculean task.

Dig deeper into DevOps job titles, roles, and responsibilities, the next article in our DevOps Guide. However, the risk with small teams means that getting all the required expertise might be a challenge, and loss of a team member might significantly impair the team’s throughput. A general agreement is that team sizes should range between 5 and 12.