How to Structure Your Organization to Achieve DevOps Excellence by Adri Villela Dzero Labs

The release manager is responsible for the entire release lifecycle, right from planning, scheduling, automating, and managing continuous delivery environments. 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. A successful DevOps team is cross-functional, with members that represent the business, development, quality assurance, operations, and anyone else involved in delivering the software. Ideally, team members have shared goals and values, collaborate continuously, and have unified processes and tooling. They are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the product, from gathering requirements, to building and testing the software, to delivering it into production, and monitoring and maintaining the software in production. Infrastructure as Code is an innovative concept of managing infrastructure operations using code. Unlike traditional environments wherein manual configuration files and scripts are used to manage configuration, IaC performs operations using code in an automated environment.

Here, the build is validated based on the organizational compliance requirements. In the test phase, the code is tested, and the Release phase delivers the application to the repository. In the deployment phase, the application is deployed to the required platforms.

DevOps Anti-Types

Based on staff size, the DevOps engineer may also be in charge of coordinating other engineers. Read our slideshow about the best tips to create an IT team to succeed in your DevOps team. You need to customize your DevOps strategies looking at the cues offered by early adopters to fully leverage its benefits. The main goal of the team is to deliver higher performance, quickly recover from outages and fail less. In opposition to the anti-types, we can look at some topologies in which DevOps can be made to work.

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. If only such teams recognised the importance of Operations as a discipline as important and valuable as software development, they would be able to avoid much pain and unnecessary operational mistakes. Clearly, there is no magic conformation or team topology which will suit every organisation.

DevOps Job Titles, Roles, & Responsibilities

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. 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. A team within Dev then acts as a source of expertise about operational features, metrics, monitoring, server provisioning, etc., and probably does most of the communication with the IaaS team. This team is still a Dev team, however, following standard practices like TDD, CI, iterative development, coaching, etc. 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 issues might be uncovered during application server checking, user experience observing, and so on. Application performance monitoring will give important information about the customer experience. A DevOps engineer should be able to develop programming as well as automate and configure operating environments within organizations. Traditional development is not compelling since it doesn’t presuppose scaling. Besides, it has restricting methods of reasoning which hinder collaboration. As innovation business keeps on developing, greater adaptability is required. As such, each team works independently and does not belong to any other team.

“DevOps is About Culture”

As team cooperation isn’t sufficiently proficient, it may take up to a month to distinguish and fix bugs or actualize and discharge minor changes. Such a long holding-up period is particularly unsafe when programming is being built and created to uphold or change basic business tasks such as Customer Relationship Management software. The XA professional should be adept at providing suggestions and solutions to improve and enhance productivity. One of the most important responsibilities of the QA specialists is to guarantee that the built product is up to the company’s quality standards. These detail-oriented specialists are also in charge of the building and implementation of inspection activities along with the apprehension and resolution of defects. 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.

Most importantly, commitment and buy-in from every member are also important. Some organisations, particularly smaller ones, might not have the finances, experience, or staff to take a lead on the operational aspects of the software they produce. The previous steps establish the team structure necessary to start the DevOps journey.

Remember: There is no ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for any one organisation.

This anti-type is becoming more and more widespread as unscrupulous recruiters jump on the bandwagon searching for candidates with automation and tooling skills. Unfortunately, it’s the human communication skills that can make DevOps thrive in an organization. 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.

Jira is a powerful tool that plans, tracks, and manages software development projects, keeping your immediate teammates and the extended organization in the loop on the status of your work. How you deliver software to production, how you create and maintain your infrastructure, and how you structure teams teams around it are what really matter. To get started with the approach, a CIO puts a DevOps initiative into an IT department.