Create the ideal DevOps team structure GitLab

Is the process by which the operating system, software, and supporting services are upgraded. When a DevSecOps platform meets a certain level of maturity, it qualifies for a streamlined delivery and ATO process. It describes the requirements that need to be met by any specific implementation before it can be considered a Standard GSA DevSecOps Platform.

devsecops organizational structure

With security and DevOps collaborating early and often, security objectives have been tightly woven into the fabric of the infrastructure. Features and applications that are deployed to production will be the result of a comprehensive and effective collaboration between security, development, and operations. Security won’t have to go ask for extra features or auditing from development teams after the fact; they will know these were built in from day one.

Overarching DevSecOps Platform Considerations

All this information can be used to inform future decisions and increase the effectiveness of the system as a whole. Retrospectives give time for team members to talk about what happened in the past couple of weeks and what they felt went right and what didn’t work for them. A system like this allows teams to be more productive through the use of experimentation instead of wasting too much time on theorizing.

  • Traditionally, ATO processes have come at the end of application development, but a DevSecOps environment requires that ATOs are achieved concurrently with development.
  • Platform teams promote good technical practices by making good decisions easier to access.
  • You may decide your organization just doesn’t have the internal expertise or resources to create your own DevOps initiative, so you should hire an outside firm or consultancy to get started.
  • Gone are the days when we could rely on static spreadsheets that lived locally on this or that person’s computer, and even communication mechanisms such as email are too manual and out of sync to be trusted.
  • Again, this goes back to empowering security organizations with the right level of resources.

Moving to DevSecOps doesn’t happen overnight — organizations need a structured and long-term plan to transform and sustain the changes. Being on a team requires a willingness to make personal and workgroup goals subservient to the larger mission. In the case of IT and security, this means building cultural bridges and personal relationships.

Benefits of the DevSecOps Model

While the actual work a team performs daily will dictate the DevOps toolchain, you will need some type of software to tie together and coordinate the work between your team and the rest of the organization. Jira is a powerful tool that plans, tracks, and manages software development projects, keeping your immediate teammates and the extended organization in the loop on the status of your work. Another ingredient for success is a leader willing to evangelize DevOps to a team, collaborative teams, and the organization at large. The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches.

devsecops organizational structure

In our 2020 Global DevSecOps Survey, 83% of respondents said their teams are releasing code more quickly but they also told us their roles were changing, dramatically in some cases. In this team structure, there are still separate dev and ops teams, but there is now a “DevOps” team that sits between, as a facilitator of sorts. This is not necessarily a bad thing and Skelton stresses that this arrangement has some use cases. For example, if this is a temporary solution with the goal being to make dev and ops more cohesive in the future, it could be a good interim strategy.

Developer experience metrics

The beauty of DevOps and Agile is that they encourage experimentation and enable rapid changes to be made. Take advantage of this expectation of DevOps and make sure to embrace new ideas at least for a short testing period to see what works best for you. The Accelerate State of DevOps Report shows that you commonly find Platform Engineering teams in high-performance organizations. Classifying each interaction can help you understand the nature of dependency and the level of service offered. You will likely interact with teams differently, but each relationship should be identifiable as one of these modes.

devsecops organizational structure

Specifically, DevOps is a system for software development that focuses on creating an ongoing feedback loop of analyzing, building and testing while leveraging automation to speed up the entire process. To achieve this kind of seamless and constant loop of software building and testing, you need to create teams of cross-functional disciplines that work in concert. Unsurprisingly, operations folks began moving into existing software delivery teams to work with other disciplines, like software developers, testers, and product managers. Security as Code ensures that continuous and automated security testing does not introduce unnecessary cost and delays to the SDLC processing. Shared metrics enable both sides to see how each contributes to achieve broader business, financial and security goals. This team structure assumes that development and operations sit together and operate on a singular team – acting as a united front with shared goals.

Application Development, Testing, and Operations

Employers also need to recognize that not all their people will want or be able to work under DevSecOps models, and some will likely leave. Consequently, organizations should create a DevSecOps talent strategy to set a direction for the resulting talent acquisition programs. We have a reliability group that manages uptime and reliability for GitLab.com, a quality department, and a distribution team, just to name a few. The way that we make all these pieces fit together is through our commitment to transparency and our visibility through the entire SDLC. But we also tweak (i.e. iterate on) this structure regularly to make everything work. A solid DevOps platform needs a solid DevOps team structure to achieve maximum efficiency.

Image management refers to lifecycle around the creation, maintenance, and delivery of those images to application developers. DevSecOps mandates the automation of security throughout the development and delivery cycle. A variety of tools have become available to harden the CI/CD pipeline.For example, if the pipeline builds containers, then the containers can be hardened immediately afterwards. After applications are built, they can be run through vulnerability scans.

Using DevOps PATHS

At its core, DevOps is an organizational paradigm that aligns development and operations practices as a shared responsibility. Automation of security checks depends strongly on the project https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ and organizational goals. Automated testing can ensure incorporated software dependencies are at appropriate patch levels, and confirm that software passes security unit testing.

devsecops organizational structure

You don’t want to reinforce the separate silos as they currently exist for any longer than absolutely necessary. This can be a good interim strategy until you can build out a full DevOps program. The DevOps team translates between the two groups, which pretty much stay in place as they currently are, and DevOps facilitates all work on a project. The right DevOps team will serve as the backbone of the entire effort and will model what success looks like to the rest of the organization.

DevOps Transformation: Metrics That Show Business Value

Security should be a nimble organization, with a pragmatic approach to applying security with minimal disruption. This team structure, popularized by Google, is where a development team hands off a product to the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, who actually runs the software. In this model, development teams provide logs and other artifacts to the SRE team to prove their software meets a sufficient standard for support from the SRE team. devops team structure Development and SRE teams collaborate on operational criteria and SRE teams are empowered to ask developers to improve their code before production. An image in the context of this framework is the definition of a component of computing infrastructure that can be instantiated for use by the platform or by application owners on that platform. Concretely, an image could be a VM image, AMI, a container image or definition, or similar products.

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