4 Ways to Build Highly Effective DevOps Team

As businesses strive to deliver faster, more reliable software solutions to meet the growing demands of consumers, the DevOps approach stands out as a beacon of efficiency, innovation, and collaboration. Recent statistics indicate the impact of DevOps: organizations that adopt DevOps practices report a 200% improvement in software deployment frequency and a 24% reduction in recovery times, according to the State of DevOps Report.

Automation stands out as a pivotal element of DevOps, with predictions stating it could eliminate 80% of routine IT tasks by 2025. This shift towards automation not only streamlines operations but also highlights the importance of a high-performing DevOps team. Building highly efficient DevOps teams requires a thorough grasp of DevOps' basic concepts, which include collaboration, automation, continuous delivery, and quick feedback.

If you are just starting your DevOps team but don’t know how to build a DevOps team, this blog will help you.  

4 Different Approaches to Building a Highly Effective DevOps Team

To avoid risks and silos in the long run, we have elaborated on 4 different ways to build a high-performing DevOps team:

Approach 1: Embed DevOps Team Within a Larger Team

One of the most popular approaches for building a DevOps team is to embed your existing DevOps team within a larger team in your company. Here, we are talking about a larger software development or operations team in the IT department. The main benefit of using this approach over others is that it eliminates the requirement of constructing a completely separate DevOps team. This not only saves time and money, but your existing organization’s resources as well. This approach works very well for smaller organizations that lack the resources to build a separate DevOps team.

The only loophole in this is that if you do not have engineers focused on DevOps, you may lose a good amount of focus from your company’s DevOps requirements. The trick to avoid this challenge is to assign your DevOps requirement to someone who understands its intricacies and gives equal priority to DevOps and the organization’s objectives. 

Approach 2: Independent DevOps Team

This approach is completely opposite of the previous one where the DevOps team was embedded. In this methodology, the DevOps team is built as a stand-alone team composed of DevOps experts whose sole focus is on DevOps. Although this team operates independently, it closely collaborates with the development and IT operations departments.

Developing an independent DevOps team is typically beneficial for large enterprises. This strategy is bound to cost more, but this investment definitely proves to be a boon in the long run for the company. Organizations receive a team dedicated to DevOps as a trade-off for the large investment this methodology requires.

Approach 3: SRE Approach

This is another approach to answer your question of how to build a DevOps team. A growing number of people are choosing to employ a specialized group of site reliability engineers, or SREs, as an alternative to standalone DevOps teams. SREs can provide a comparable function to DevOps engineers, notwithstanding their differences.

So, companies that create an SRE team get something that functions very much like a separate DevOps team that works in tandem with IT operations and development. SREs can offer a wider range of capabilities to the table than DevOps engineers, which is the primary distinction between them and a genuine DevOps team. For example, SREs are typically more extensively involved in incident response.

Approach 4: Cooperative Ownership of DevOps

Making DevOps a common duty of all engineers rather than identifying any one team or set of engineers as DevOps specialists is a relatively unconventional approach to the formation of a DevOps team. According to this concept, everyone in the company "owns" the CI/CD and DevOps obligations equally.

The main risk here is that there is a likelihood that no one will actually perform DevOps if primary responsibility is not assigned to someone in particular. However, for smaller businesses with robust shared responsibility and collaborative modeling cultures, this can be the easiest and most effective way to deploy DevOps.

Using any of the given approaches, you can build an efficient DevOps team structure. However, before deciding any approach, consider factors like how large your organization is, the number of resources you can invest in DevOps, and how much collaboration exists in your company. Although there is not a single, best way to incorporate DevOps into your company, you should carefully consider your culture and available resources before deciding on a specific DevOps team structure.

Identifying Key Roles in a DevOps Team

Here are the key roles in the DevOps team: 

1. DevOps Evangelist

An Evangelist must possess two critical leadership qualities: being a business pioneer and managing teams excited about the process and their company. They should strongly cultivate positive connections with all software development and IT operations teams. Furthermore, an Evangelist must ensure the product's high availability throughout the pre-production and production stages.

2. Release Manager

The release manager oversees the process and is sometimes called the DevOps engineer. The CI/CD pipeline is managed by DevOps engineers, who ensure that software releases happen smoothly and on time. They must collaborate closely with operations and development in this capacity to quickly resolve release-related concerns.

3. Automation Architect

The automation architect’s job is to find ways to automate repetitive development and deployment tasks. This role is about cutting down on manual work, which helps reduce mistakes and speeds up the software delivery process.

4. Software Developer/Tester

In DevOps, software developers and testers collaborate more closely than ever. They share responsibilities, ensuring that testing happens early and often. This teamwork leads to spotting and fixing issues sooner, making the software more reliable.

5. Security Engineer

Their major objective is to prevent vulnerabilities before they become significant issues by implementing security measures early in software development. The security engineer integrates security procedures into the workflows for operations and development.

6. Operations Engineer

Operations engineers are primarily concerned with the software’s host systems. They ensure that every setting, including servers and databases, is appropriate for the software to function properly. To enhance the dependability and functionality of the system, they also provide engineers with input.

Challenges in Building and Sustaining a DevOps Team

The following are the main DevOps issues that you will face when implementing DevOps practices, along with solutions:

1. Choosing Appropriate DevOps Metrics

Challenge: One of the biggest obstacles to adopting the DevOps methodology in a given firm is figuring out which metrics are most pertinent and helpful. This is so that the efficacy and efficiency of a DevOps process can be assessed using a variety of metrics, including defect escape rate, mean time to recover from failures, lead time for changes, and deployment frequency. Determining which metrics are crucial to your firm might be difficult, as not all of these indicators may be useful or suitable for a particular one.

Solution: One way to find and monitor DevOps metrics would be to use a data-driven strategy. This may entail gathering and visualizing data on many facets of the DevOps process using tools like dashboards and analytics platforms. This can assist companies in determining the appropriate KPIs, spotting patterns and trends in their data, and concentrating on areas where they might be able to streamline their operations or encounter bottlenecks or other problems.

2. Security in DevOps

Challenge: Since traditional approaches to security might impede quick development and deployment, security in DevOps ensures that security demands are appropriately addressed throughout the development process. It can be challenging for companies that use a continuous delivery approach, where code is updated and released often.

Solution: To overcome this obstacle, you could apply the DevSecOps methodology. Security is incorporated into the DevOps process from the beginning using DevSecOps. The development, security, and operations teams work together to design and automatically deliver secure solutions. 

Organizations can apply DevSecOps by implementing procedures and tools like automated testing frameworks and static analysis tools, which let developers find and address security flaws early in the development cycle.

3. Microservices Increasing Complexity

Challenge: Managing many independently deployable service components becomes more complicated in a DevOps environment when microservices are used. This may make monitoring service dependencies, debugging problems, and guaranteeing proper system operation more challenging.

Solution: Tools and procedures that help businesses efficiently manage and monitor their microservices environment can be implemented to help them meet this DevOps issue. This may entail monitoring and logging systems to keep tabs on the functionality and health of individual services and employing technologies like orchestration platforms or service meshes to handle communication between services.

4. Change is Huge

Challenge: In a DevOps context, managing changes requires striking a balance between ensuring system stability and reliability and speedy deployment. It can be challenging since adding new features to a system entails risks and weaknesses, and the likelihood of problems increases with the frequency of additions.

Solution: Adopting a culture of continuous testing and monitoring, where changes are carefully verified and validated before being sent to production, is one way to overcome this difficulty. It typically entails putting automated testing frameworks into place and tracking the functionality and behavior of the system after changes are made using tools like logging and monitoring platforms.

5. Choosing and Adopting the Right DevOps Tools

Challenge: The DevOps market is flooded with DevOps tools, just like the metrics. However, since every business may have diverse needs, no universally applicable standard tools exist. Thus, choosing and incorporating the appropriate technologies into the development and deployment process is essential to an organization’s success with DevOps.

Solution: One approach to overcoming this obstacle is to adopt a DevOps toolchain, a collection of integrated technologies that assist the development and deployment process. A DevOps toolchain includes version control, continuous integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring tools. 

Case Study: Etsy's DevOps Transformation - How Training Enhanced Team Collaboration and Deployment

Company Overview: Etsy, an American eCommerce company founded in 2005 focused on handmade and vintage items and craft supplies that has almost 4.4 million sellers and 81.9 million buyers. It is one of the earliest companies to adopt DevOps. In 2009, they adopted DevOps and have been living and breathing the methodology ever since. 

Problem: Back in 2005, Etsy’s engineering team was siloed into developers, database administrators, and operation teams. The discrepancies within team collaborations combined with other barriers of using monolithic architecture were affecting its ability to obtain cutting-edge results out of its software development efforts

Solution: In 2008, Etsy’s engineers started realizing the cons of their existing model, and moved towards a more collaborative approach between software developers and operations, that is DevOps. Although challenging, they formed a collaborative DevOps team and started working on eliminating the use of their middleware software stack. This stabilized their site, and upgraded its database providing developers the access to production activities to help troubleshoot issues. Now, Etsy deploys more than 50 times a day.

Takeaways: Etsy's case study illustrated the importance of introducing DevOps based approach in corporate organizations to enhance communication and collaboration among the development and operations teams. DevOps’ practices not only help in increasing the product deployment rates, but also helps with smooth functioning of the CI/CD pipeline. Using these practices, Etsy revolutionized its deployment rates from 2 times a week to 50-100 times in a single day. Faster time to market, automating repetitive tasks to increase efficiency, and enhanced reliability are a few of the reasons for introducing DevOps’ best practices in your organizations.

Conclusion

Companies looking to improve productivity and creativity in today's fast-paced world must adopt DevOps principles. Building a successful DevOps team structure requires various skills, including bringing in outside experts, setting clear objectives, selecting appropriate tools, and tracking performance with pertinent metrics. Organizations can surmount obstacles, including picking relevant KPIs, guaranteeing security, handling microservices complexity, adjusting to changes, and selecting suitable technologies using strategic planning, cooperation, and a dedication to ongoing enhancement.

By taking on these difficulties head-on, businesses can build strong DevOps processes that promote growth, resilience, and success in a constantly changing digital environment.

As a global leader in corporate training, Edstellar helps you build high-performing DevOps teams by providing in-demand devops skills to support your development projects. Check the highly effective instructor-led devops training programs that best fit your organization.