How do you improve your cloud DevOps team's performance?

To improve the performance of any team, it is essential to establish clear boundaries of roles and responsibilities. This is even more important in a Cloud DevOps team, given the multitude of technologies and tasks involved and you will have to be very careful to define the boundaries to improve efficiency and performance of the team. One effective approach is to organize your team into pods based on roles, levels, or project assignments. This segmentation allows for the more efficient utilization of the team's skills.

To be able to improve the performance of your team you need to figure out what are the bottlenecks and where they are spending their time. Are they spending most of their time unblocking other team members (qa, dev teams), or they are pulled aside to solve "urgent" things or do they have to work all day long to keep unstable platforms up and running? Measure first so that you can identify what are the things that taking most of the focus and start solving these issues first which will ensure they have more time to do important things that are in accordance with the team goals. There are many cases where bad performances are caused by often context switching and a lack of procedures, documentation, and standards.

Some most important responsibilities : 1- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is the heart of DevOps. This pipeline comprises integrated processes required to automate build, test, and deployment. 2- To enable you to build a highly scalable and flexible application you must use different architectures such as Microservices, serverless architecture, and cloud architecture. 3- As the development and operations teams have opposite objectives, development, and security operations have conflicting objectives too, So it should be incorporated into the planning stage of development.

Frequent misunderstandings often occur regarding the tasks and responsibilities of a DevOps position. Is a DevOps professional synonymous with a cloud engineer or a platform engineer? In summary, in many companies, the concepts of DevOps Methodology and a DevOps Engineer lack precise definitions. Therefore, the management team and other squads need to first understand the definition and the primary responsibilities associated with this role.

Security is automated to be on par with continuous delivery in terms of speed and scale. By removing unnecessary programs, and accessible accounts, you can reduce threats. 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. In a DevOps environment, automating security rules is important too. Automatic scripts that can be executed at the granular level to facilitate flexible customization of exceptions and modes. The team should verify if it meets the baseline and then continuously monitor it to avoid deviations. It should be continuously improved and updated as well.

DevOps teams are special. They work within a unique culture. 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. 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. Providing the right tools, engaging them on visionary projects, working under competent management and quality people are some of the aspects that will help you retain your employees.