Shana is a product marketer passionate about DevOps and what it means for teams of all shapes and sizes. She loves understanding the challenges software teams face, and building content solutions that help address those challenges. If she's not at work, she's likely wandering the aisles of her local Trader Joes, strolling around Golden Gate, or grabbing a beer with friends. Atlassian’s Open DevOps provides everything teams need to develop and operate software.

Security engineers -- specifically, ones who understand DevSecOps and can put its tenets into practice -- are another core part of a DevOps organization. One technique is to embrace shift-right testing https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ for noncritical features. This enables some tests to be performed after code is deployed, which reduces the number of tests that run pre-deployment and gets new releases into production faster.

How to think about DevOps team structure

The benefits of DevOps include faster and easier releases, team efficiency, increased security, higher quality products, and consequently happier teams and customers. The DevOps lifecycle consists of eight phases representing the processes, capabilities, and tools needed for development (on the left side of the loop) and operations (on the right side of the loop). Throughout each phase, teams collaborate and communicate to maintain alignment, velocity, and quality. 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.

• By removing unnecessary programs, accessible accounts, you can reduce threats.
• The goal of this team is to reduce the load of stream-aligned teams who work on systems that include or use the subsystem.
• Platform teams work with development teams to create one or more golden pathways.
• Organizations like this suffer from basic operational mistakes and could be much more successful if they understand the value ops brings to the table.
• Underperforming teams happen when you don’t build in the need for people to work together to unlock their unique talents.
• This separation of concerns and decoupled independent function allows for DevOps practices like continuous delivery and continuous integration.
• Overall, the specific sub-roles within a DevOps team will depend on the needs and goals of the organization and may involve a combination of these and other roles.

These include greater opportunities for knowledge sharing and narrow specialization within a particular team or department. If you find that mono-functional teams work well with the rest of the organization, you should not reformat them for the sake of the idea of reorganization. What is important is not the structure of the organization itself, but the interaction between the teams to improve the overall effectiveness of the organization as a whole. As such, organizations should focus more on retaining existing employees instead of recruiting new ones. Organizations generally incur significant costs in training new employees and integrating resources across teams.

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

And it’s something we practice a lot when it comes to our own DevOps team structure. We also have other functional DevOps groups besides “Dev” that manage other aspects of our product. Devs today are creating, monitoring, and maintaining infrastructures, roles that were traditionally the province of ops pros. Ops are spending more time managing cloud services, while security team members are working on cross-functional teams with dev and ops more than ever before. A two-tier model, with a business systems team responsible for the end-to-end product cycle and platform teams that manage the underlying hardware, software, and other infrastructure. DevOps and SRE groups are separate, with DevOps part of the dev team and Site Reliability Engineers part of ops.

Developers are focused on introducing features according to project requirements using existing software, while the operations teams are concerned about the stability of the infrastructure. As such, change is something that developers want, and operations worry about. Product quality is also the sole responsibility of the Quality team.

reate effective cross-functional teams

Automation is one of the most important DevOps practices because it enables teams to move much more quickly through the process of developing and deploying high-quality software. With automation the simple act of pushing code changes to a source code repository can trigger a build, test, and deployment process that significantly reduces the time these steps take. The foundation of DevOps is a culture of collaboration between developers and operations teams, who share responsibilities and combine work.

They empower DevOps practices by helping to improve collaboration, reduce context-switching, introduce automation, and enable observability and monitoring. DevOps values devops team structure are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process.

Quality and reliability

Pick up hard skills in programming, orchestration, cloud administration and automation to support a DevOps methodology. Place high importance on communication, as well as project and change management, to share this vital IT knowledge with other members of the team. It’s likely to succeed if the team has members from both existing teams and where it’s a stepping stone to cross-functional teams. To get the most out of DevOps, a business should engage other teams within the organization, even those whose members aren't in technical roles.

Then go down to the individual level to touch every member of the team. The secret to success in a DevOps environment is gaining top-down buy-in across the organization. As the DevOps team collaborates with multiple departments and people, providing them with the right tools and technologies is very essential.

Atlassian Together

To enact DevSecOps, an organization must set up tools and processes that enable developers, security engineers and IT professionals to participate in security operations. All three groups of stakeholders should have visibility into security problems so that they can counter those problems in a collaborative manner. Likewise, developers should be prepared to communicate with security engineers early and often to help design code that is secure from the start. IT engineers should work closely with the security team to ensure that their deployment and management processes follow best practices with regard to application and infrastructure security. 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.

This team incorporates customer feedback in development cycles, while maintaining software in production. By aligning the needs of the business with DevOps teams, organizations will empower team members to focus on the business objectives, rather than simply work on assigned projects and tasks. Whether it's with two pizzas in a conference room or the adoption of real-time collaboration tools and easily updated documentation, organizations must make an effort to bring DevOps teams together. The particular activities and tasks will vary, depending on the existing corporate culture, proximity to like-minded IT folks and leadership.

Making DevOps A Companywide Initiative

However, identifying potential talent within the organization and building new DevOps teams would be a good idea. Not only is it cost-effective but the knowledge they possess and share with others will be an added advantage. System hardening is another security process that strengthens the system configuration and reduces potential vulnerabilities. By removing unnecessary programs, accessible accounts, you can reduce threats. Customizing security rules above or beyond regular configurations is required. You need to implement more configuration settings when an application accepts logins and relax rules when updates and other modes of operations are going on.