Getting started with DevOps practices

[Mahsa Tehrani]

Benefits of DevOps

The value of DevOps is big. Nearly all (99%) of respondents said DevOps has had a positive impact on their organization, according to the 2020 DevOps Trends Survey. Teams that practice DevOps ship better work faster, streamline incident responses, and improve collaboration and communication across teams. Read more on the benefits of DevOps. 

What is a DevOps Culture? 

At its essence, a DevOps culture involves closer collaboration and a shared responsibility between development and operations for the products they create and maintain. This helps companies align their people, processes, and tools toward a more unified customer focus. 

Read more on DevOps culture. 

Team Topologies

Engineering teams are required to move faster than ever to deliver value to their customers. The rise of cloud, SaaS, and always-on services means that customers expect new features, fewer bugs, and 99.99% (or higher) up-time. 

To keep pace with these demands, organizations adopted agile practices and, more recently, DevOps practices, which promises faster time to market/lead time, improvement deployment frequency, better team culture, and increased collaboration across teams/ departments. 

Read more on Team Topologies. 

The importance of team structure in DevOps

When a software team is on the path to practicing DevOps, it’s important to understand that different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. 

Do you have a DevOps team at your company? There's a good chance you do. In our DevOps Trends survey, we found that more than two-thirds of surveyed organizations have a team or individual that carries the title “DevOps” in some capacity.  

As DevOps becomes more widespread, we often hear software teams are now DevOps teams. However, simply adding new tools or designating a team as DevOps is not enough to fully realize the benefits of DevOps. Read more on team structure in DevOps. 

What skills do you need to become an engineer on a DevOps Team?

When an organization is rooted in a siloed structure where development and operations work separately, implementing DevOps often entails an organizational overhaul. It takes the right people, culture, and tools to successfully implement DevOps. Yet one of the most common hurdles to implementing DevOps is a lack of skills in employees, according to Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps Trends Survey.

 What is a DevOps engineer? A DevOps engineer is an IT generalist who should have a wide-ranging knowledge of both development and operations, including coding, infrastructure management, system administration, and DevOps toolchains. DevOps engineers should also possess interpersonal skills since they work across company silos to create a more collaborative environment. 

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