Ultimate Guide for Learning A DevOps Organization Structure

Organizations like this still see ops as something that supports the initiatives for software development, not something with value in itself. Organizations like this suffer from basic operational mistakes and could be much more successful if they understand the value ops brings to the table. Learn about the benefits of stream-aligned devops team structure teams, and how they work with platform teams, sub-system teams, and enabling teams to deliver value to customers. In this team structure, a team within the development team acts as a source of expertise for all things operations and does most of the interfacing with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) team.

devops organization structure

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 https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ software, to delivering it into production, and monitoring and maintaining the software in production. Many people see DevOps as simply development and operations working cohesively and collaborating together. Just as important is for operations teams to understand the desire of development teams to reduce deployment time and time to market. The successful model we’ve seen is to develop a pipeline for your pipeline.

Other organizational DevOps schemes include:

Building a DevOps culture requires a shift in mindset and organizational practices. By encouraging open communication and collaboration, fostering a blameless culture, focusing on customer needs, and prioritizing experimentation and innovation, organizations can create an environment where DevOps thrives. This will lead to increased efficiency, innovation, and a more collaborative working environment, ultimately transforming software delivery and collaboration within the organization. DevOps emphasizes the importance of delivering value to customers quickly and efficiently. This requires a focus on customer needs and a commitment to continuous improvement.

The DevOps team translates between the two groups, which pretty much stay in place as they currently are, and DevOps facilitates all work on a project. 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. Deployment automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible may help with automating tasks. Such as, provisioning VMs, configuring networks or deploying code changes automatically without any human interaction required until something goes wrong.

5.1. Creating a “Center of Excellence” or “DevOps Guild”

Perhaps it is easiest to start with some examples of anti-patterns — structures that are almost always doomed to fail. These organizational structures bring with them some significant hurdles to success. In the 1980’s, Jack Welsh, at the time the CEO of General Electric, introduced the idea of the “boundaryless organization” in a process that became known as GE Work-out. The focus was teams that were able to quickly make informed decisions, what people in Agile might today call self-organizing teams. But defining the correct organizational structure is a little more difficult than explaining the role and makeup of the team.

devops organization structure

Atlassian offers an Open DevOps solution that provides end-to-end DevOps processes with Atlassian and other third-party tools. With Jira as the backbone, teams can use Atlassian products or bring their favorite products to the open toolchain. The Atlassian ecosystem offers a robust array of integrations and add-ons, allowing teams to customize their toolchain to meet their needs. Be sure to check out our DevOps tutorials for automation, testing, security, observability, feature flagging, and continuous delivery.

DevSecOps, BizOps, and others

In preparation for the upcoming sprint, teams must workshop to explore, organize, and prioritize ideas. Because of the continuous nature of DevOps, practitioners use the infinity loop to show how the phases of the DevOps lifecycle relate to each other. Despite appearing to flow sequentially, the loop symbolizes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire lifecycle. The Accelerate State of DevOps Report shows that you commonly find Platform Engineering teams in high-performance organizations. If you have to create a groundbreaking 3D rendering engine, you may need a complicated subsystem team to handle the challenges. Stream-aligned teams work on a single valuable stream of work, usually aligned to a business domain.

  • By defining clear roles and fostering a sense of shared ownership, organizations can ensure that team members understand their responsibilities and contribute effectively to the team’s objectives.
  • Just be sure that you understand what is and what isn’t working as well as why.
  • Shubham is a professional marketer, startup enthusiast, and LinkedIn addict.
  • The designer doesn’t feel the pain of having to maintain what was designed, so designs don’t get better.
  • As with software development, it is far easier to transform a single stream with a small group of stakeholders than to attempt an all-at-once organizational transition to a new way of working.

Platform teams promote good technical practices by making good decisions easier to access. An enabling team takes a long-term view of technology to bring a competitive advantage to organizations. Where part of your system is highly specialized, you might use a complicated subsystem team to manage it. For example, if the skills needed are so specialized, you must pool them. Finding the right mix of individuals to create a small team with the necessary skills is challenging. Still, the results are high-bandwidth information flow and increasingly brilliant collaboration.

4. Implementing DevOps Teams

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. Steve Fenton is an Octonaut at Octopus Deploy and a six-time Microsoft MVP with more than two decades of experience in software delivery. They protect the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by helping increase skills and install new technology. As an enabling team, the goal is to give the knowledge to teams, not to dictate what they do with it. A complicated-subsystem team is responsible for building and maintaining a part of the system that depends on specific skills and knowledge.

devops organization structure

By integrating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline, DevSecOps is an active, integrated part of the development process. Security is built into the product by integrating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows. Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product.

2.3. Encouraging Regular Communication and Collaboration

Even though DevOps is arguably the most efficient way to get software out the door, no one actually ever said it’s easy. Fоr а соmраny tо thrive, it hаs tо rise tо the highest level аnd unleаsh the true роtentiаl thаt lies within. Different teams аre resроnsible fоr hоw vаriоus рrосesses wоrk in  а firm. When develорers аnd орerаtоrs wоrk tоgether, the functioning of а соmраny improves. Adopting DevOps and hiring DevOps experts or an agency following DevOps structure саn turn оut tо be vаluаble fоr а business to imрlement it wisely.

He has built multi-national agile teams that value self-direction and self-organization. When not speaking or coding, you are likely to find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming, and domain-specific languages. Your team should be self-contained and work should happen with immediate teammates to ensure fast delivery. Beyond work scope, minimal hand-offs can also take the form of automated processes. Automating your development cycle ensures that moving things along is a seamless process, regardless if the next step is an action like an automated test or merge to main, or an actual human. Does your team have time to address code quality changes (a.k.a. “tech debt”) to ensure changes are safe and easy?

Mapping the DevSecOps Landscape

Breaking down silos within an organization is a vital component of the DevOps Revolution. This, in turn, leads to improved efficiency, faster delivery of software, and a more satisfying working environment for team members. By the end of this post, readers will have gained a deep understanding of DevOps culture and its impact on organizational structure. They will be well-equipped with strategies for building a DevOps culture, breaking down silos, defining roles and responsibilities, implementing DevOps teams, and scaling DevOps across the organization. Through the insights and case studies presented in this post, readers will appreciate the transformative power of DevOps, enabling them to drive innovation and collaboration in their own organizations. The DevOps revolution has the potential to redefine software delivery and collaboration, offering a pathway toward greater efficiency, speed, and quality in an ever-evolving technological landscape.