Tuesday 15 July 2014

If DevOps isn't a job title then it can't be a team? Can it?

I blogged earlier how DevOps is cultural idea and not a job title.  Definitely not.  Unimaginable.

So how is it I run a "DevOps" team?   Surely that's a collective of "DevOps engineers"?!

Ok so I appreciate that this contradictory in the extreme.

Or is it......?

My team "Platform Services" supports the idea of the change platform at my company.  The change platform consists of tools such as Jenkins, Puppet, uDeploy, Teamcity, TFS and a few others.

Someone ultimately needs to "own" the tools making sure they are maintained, creating best practices and establishing a roadmap for the future.

My team goes beyond this and helps different change functions adapt to the change platform and are evangelists for things like DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

With DevOps being concerned with breaking down silos its contradictory to have a team that bottleneck of knowledge and skills.  To this end, Platform Services is the silo-buster - we help others pick up the tools & processes and implement them.  

For example, we don't do deployments ourselves but we do sell the benefits to other teams and help them to adopt the tools and processes.

I think this is a good model and helps spread the success of DevOps around the IT function.

It helps that consultancy from my guys is effectively free to other parts of the IT team (thanks to an enlightened CIO & CTO).  

Why wouldn't you take the teams advice?  Why wouldn't you follow the patterns of success established elsewhere?

Go create a DevOps team; just don't let them become a silo.


No comments:

Post a Comment