DevOps Roles And Responsibilities

What is DvOps?

DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality

Many people who were not acquainted with the reality of DevOps workflow thought the goal of the movement is to combine the Dev, QA and Ops departments into a single team, share their roles, teach them to use each other’s tools and let the DevOps magic work. Far too many companies tried this way and failed.

Mixing the Developers with Ops engineers would not allow to solve this problem. The solution was altering the approach to software delivery in favor of 3 core DevOps values:

1. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — server environments are described in declarative manifests, that are stored as code, can be adjusted by any team member and reused multiple times to provision the required infrastructure for testing or building the code, as well as for maintaining the app in production.
2. Continuous Integration (CI) — the feedback from project stakeholders and end users is constantly integrated into the product in form of specs and feature requests for the next iteration of software development.
3. Continuous Delivery (CD) — automatic code delivery pipelines are in place to ensure all the required resources are provisioned automatically and the code is pushed into production as soon as it passes the tests, without additional manual actions of the DevOps engineers or without interrupting the end user experience. Achieving the “no service downtime” is available due to using rolling updates and other DevOps practices.

The real-life DevOps team composition

To make it clear, DevOps engineers should concentrate on one thing, and one thing only: cloud infrastructure management. The main difference is that they follow the “you built it — you run it” paradigm, and they have to evaluate the possible bottlenecks of running the app in production from the very beginning of the software delivery process.

This is why they facilitate the “shift to the left” approach, where all kinds of testing are done after pushing each new batch of code to the repo before building the new software version. The DevOps specialists think of how the app will run long before the app is created, and they write scripts to create CI/CD pipelines that guarantee faster time-to-market for the product and positive end user experience.

To ensure this approach is feasible, there must be the following DevOps roles:

1. Product owner — the intersection between the team and the customer, the person that understands how the app should run to deliver value to the users, and what cloud infrastructure is needed to support the app in production. This can be a person on the customer’s side, or on the side of an outsourced DevOps team, depending on the project requirements and other factors.
2. Team Lead — this is the position for the most experienced team member, who can analyze the required skill set for each project and delegate the DevOps responsibilities across the team.
3. Cloud Architect — the person with ample hands-on experience with building cloud infrastructures and understanding what they have to include to support various types of apps and services in production.
4. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) — the DevOps specialist concentrated at ensuring stable performance and uninterrupted availability of high-load apps across large-scale systems.
5. DevOps system administrator — one of the main DevOps roles, as cloud monitoring accounts for more than a half of all DevOps tasks and time. Each team member has to be able to handle the support tasks, yet these are the bread and butter for the support administrator.

This is the real-word DevOps team composition that allows to reach the needed results and successfully launch the products.