How to create a successful DevOps organizational structure

Despite appearing to flow sequentially, the loop symbolizes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire lifecycle. An example of how this looks in practice can be illustrated with one of our customers, Cox Automotive. The automobile dealer and buyer witnessed significant growth after acquiring over 20 companies. They had minimal IT resources and their DevOps practice was not as effective as expected. Cox Automotive wanted to build a DevOps team that encouraged both the creation and consumption of reusable assets––enabling the growing number of acquired companies to leverage assets effectively and securely.

For example, if this is a temporary solution with the goal being to make dev and ops more cohesive in the future, it could be a good interim strategy. DevOps is not a silver bullet that will make all your problems go away. DevOps helps to optimize your IT organization’s process for software development along each step of the development chain.

DevOps culture: Westrum organizational culture

By focusing on the six aspects of Westrum’s typology, teams and organizations can work thoughtfully and meaningfully toward improving their culture. In his research, he developed the following typology of organizational cultures. Cloud IoT Core IoT device management, integration, and connection service. AutoML Custom machine learning model development, with minimal effort.

Create cross-functional teams that include representatives from each functional area of the software delivery process . This practice lets everyone share the responsibility for building, deploying, and maintaining a product. Platform teams enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. While the stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing an application in production, the platform team provides internal services that the stream-aligned team can use. Because stream-aligned teams work on the full spectrum of delivery, they are, by necessity, closer to the customer and usually already agile. This team incorporates customer feedback in development cycles, while maintaining software in production.

2. Breaking Down Silos

Successfully implementing DevOps within a single team is a notable accomplishment. However, truly realizing the benefits of DevOps requires scaling these practices across the entire organization. This section delves into the strategies and best practices for expanding DevOps throughout the organization, fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and rapid delivery. In order to create a successful cross-functional team, consider including representatives from development, operations, QA, security, and product management. By having diverse perspectives, your team will be better equipped to make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement. Operations engineers are responsible for managing the infrastructure that supports an application, monitoring its performance, and collaborating with developers to optimize deployments.

  • If the organization is undergoing a massive reorganization aimed at eliminating the hierarchical structure, this can lead to certain problems.
  • In order to embrace these practices, organizations must adopt the necessary tools.
  • Experimentation and innovation are key components of a successful DevOps culture.
  • Day 2 Operations for GKE Tools and guidance for effective GKE management and monitoring.
  • Place high importance on communication, as well as project and change management, to share this vital IT knowledge with other members of the team.

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Steps for Building a Successful DevOps Team Structure

Finally, in section 4.5, we discussed strategies for scaling DevOps across the organization, including the creation of a “center of excellence” or a “DevOps guild” to share knowledge and best practices. By implementing organization-wide tools and processes and continuously monitoring progress, organizations can ensure ongoing improvement at the organizational level. Breaking down silos (section 4.2) is a critical aspect of establishing a DevOps culture, as it enables teams to work together effectively and share knowledge. By removing barriers between teams and promoting cross-functional collaboration, organizations can create a more streamlined and efficient software development process. Another key aspect of scaling DevOps is adopting organization-wide tools and processes. This may include shared CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration platforms, or a unified monitoring and logging solution.

It’s best to build out a strong foundation of automation, configuration management, and continuous delivery practices to help ease the load. Teams entrenched in siloed ways of working can struggle with, or even be resistant to, overhauling team structures to embrace DevOps practices. Some teams may mistakenly believe new tools are sufficient to adopt DevOps.

Development and operations collaboration

This means we want people to bring us bad news so we can make things better. By removing blame, you remove fear; and by removing fear, you enable teams to surface problems and solve them more https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ effectively. Also create and foster an environment where it is safe to take smart risks and fail, so that anyone can surface problems at any time—even without the ceremony of a postmortem.

devops org structure

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. You should also create a culture of cooperation between developers, testers and operations teams through regular communication meetings to build a DevOps Organization structure. Where they work together to find ways to improve their processes while sharing what has been learned from the previous DevOps project.

Different teams require different structures, depending on the broader context of the company.

It is beneficial because it has increased speed and agility when deploying new functionality. But this also means monitoring becomes more crucial than ever from an operations standpoint. Jenkins CI/CD pipeline provides various interfaces аnd tools in order to automate the entire рrосess.

devops org structure

Share your thoughts by creating a new topic in the GitLab community forum. Have a process for monitoring security, metrics, and everything in between. Be mindful and respectful of the difficulties your teammates may be dealing with, be ready to give and receive feedback quickly, and trust each other for an optimal outcome and pleasant work environment. Nothing creates more bottlenecks on a team than members who don’t talk to each other, and DevOps projects always have a million moving parts.

DevOps team roles

Similar to Dr. Westrum’s findings, DORA research shows that a high-trust, generative culture predicts software delivery and organizational performance in technology. It’s important devops team structure 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.