Metrics must be detailed enough to be traced back to a team, tracked quarterly, and attributed to a business outcome so that executives can see where they need more coverage or support. Perhaps more important than understanding the power in combining these four elements of the model is having a practical approach to making it happen, derived from lessons in the field. The complexity and scale of an infrastructure transformation make evident the value of careful orchestration, creating points of integration with a wide array of functions across IT and the business, and sequencing activities to reduce risk. Applications like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are also necessary for teams to communicate quickly and efficiently, especially in a remote-first world.
- On a day-to-day basis, the cloud operations engineer creates processes for measuring system effectiveness and identifies areas for improvement.
- The cloud migration project will require a DevOps engineer to oversee the development teams, closing the gap between them and system administrators.
- There’s also likely more potential for better consistency and throughput at an organization level.
- If a team consistently meets every goal, more likely than not, the goals were not hard enough to start with.
- Projects save them running from emergency to emergency until they burn out, or from slowing down to deal with interruptions (a big productivity killer).
- This includes the creation and management of virtual machines, cloud storage, and networking components.
It’s about being agile enough to deal with missing them and confronting sensitive issues for the collective good of the team. It’s a journey – starting with every team member’s commitment to using the following six practices. Operations might be responsible for keeping plenty of talent in the recruitment pipeline, promoting interdepartmental communication, supervising other teams’ activities, and figuring out how to best leverage resources to prevent and solve problems.
RESOURCES
They include infrastructure planning and deployment, cloud architecture design, security processes, and policies, as well as governance frameworks and compliance requirements, to name a few. Defining and implementing an operating model is critical for a successful cloud adoption journey. The constraints and considerations of on-premises infrastructure and operations are different from those in the cloud. Operating in the cloud provides many benefits, such as flexibility, scalability, and cost savings; however, when moving to the cloud, there is a shift from physical to digital assets, with focus on higher level operations. The magnitude and complexity of building the new IT infrastructure operating model requires careful orchestration and coordination. As such, companies often set up a transformation office (TO), led by a senior executive, such as the chief information officer or the head of infrastructure, to steer the effort.
Different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. As the Service Management and DevOps teams are brought together with a common goal, you will likely be pleasantly surprised with what they are able to achieve together. Each team wants to provide value but many times their methodologies are not aligned.
How to Create an Effective Cloud Migration Team Structure
Developers that specialize in cloud projects understand specific cloud resources, services, architectures and service-level agreements in order to create scalable and extensive software products. A cloud project may involve multiple software development teams, each focusing on a particular aspect of the project — be it the user interface, network https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ code or back-end integration. As IT migrates to the new operating model, SREs may focus 70 percent or more of their time on operations. But as they remove “toil”—the manual or low-value-added work—and system complexity, the ratio will become more balanced; over time, SRE teams should spend most of their time on engineering activities.
This seems like a logical approach; however, you may want to first take an objective look at what talent already existing within your organization and opportunities you may have available. In many companies there have most likely been a significant investment in their Service Management teams and solutions. These teams have amassed substantial knowledge of the applications, infrastructure and the critical business processes being supported. Over the course of years, it has been their job to align IT changes, create a predictable / maintainable structure to enable the business to function without interruption and respond rapidly to minimize impact when issues arise. Most likely they have been engaged at all levels of the business to manage the Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Asset and Disaster Recovery functions which they are responsible. Ideally, as a core element of their function, their role has included establishing key data and metrics which enable fact-based information to allow solid decision making by all levels of management.
DevOps as an external party
This person works with the security manager to ensure that the organization is in compliance with industry privacy and security standards and requirements. Most public cloud providers offer their customers tools for CloudOps, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM. Network engineering teams can also use proprietary tools from Apigee or Flexera, formerly RightScale, as well as open source tools such as Ansible or Chef to automate configuration management, cloud provisioning and application deployment. Migrating applications to the cloud brings its own benefits, such as freeing up internal infrastructure. However, what’s moved to the cloud still must be managed, and the work around maintaining cloud-based applications and data stays relatively the same as managing them on site. To do this, a CloudOps team must select the right monitoring and automation tools for the workloads that run in the cloud.
Maintaining security plays a role in preventing data breaches, as well as reducing downtime and outages. Cloud security managers should work with compliance specialists to proactively design architectures with compliance standards in mind, making security recommendations during architecture reviews or during post-mortems. Business leaders are typically the project stakeholders or executive sponsors who manage the budget for a cloud project and anticipate the tangible benefits from the project’s outcome. Additionally, they establish the cloud project’s goals, gather metrics and evaluate success. A third common path is to move from “Before you begin” to an infrastructure (or even tools) team, skipping a Kitchen Sink and product/application phase.
Agile Project Management
We recommended that you, jointly with your Oracle field teams or implementation partners, conduct workshops around these four areas and related sub-tasks, using your requirements as inputs. Setting these goals also helped the bank avoid the common pitfall of starting a transformation without focus, which can result in operating-model changes that increase IT complexity. Counterintuitively, setting high goals helped bank employees feel freer to test, learn, and think creatively to achieve their targets. Goals should be hard enough to promote outside-the-box thinking and present a challenge. If a team consistently meets every goal, more likely than not, the goals were not hard enough to start with. Setting stretch goals and targets gets teams excited about transformation and can create a culture of collaboration.
This is a radical departure from the way in which most operations teams normally operate. The cloud architect is responsible for designing the cloud-based infrastructure and supervising the cloud computing strategy. They are tasked with evaluating and analyzing cloud service offerings, determining cloud architecture solutions that fit the requirements of the business and ensuring optimal performance of cloud applications and services. The cloud project manager is also responsible for cooperation between all of the other team members and coordinating each component of the cloud migration process.
Microsoft gives its cloud operations a restructure and new team lineup
These standards allow the team to develop tools and services that deal with this data across the entire organization. When thinking about organization structure, I find that it helps to consider layers of operational concern while mapping the ownership of those concerns. We highly recommend evaluating both “Reliability standards and practices” and “Tiers of service” as early in the SRE process as possible, but that may be feasible only after you’ve established your first SRE team. Contact us today for further information about our cloud engineering services and more. The responsibilities of a cloud engineer include coding the architect’s designs, deciding how applications ought to operate and scaling their components, performing maintenance, upgrading existing cloud systems, and developing new ones. Bear in mind, though, that it’s best to limit each rotation to one person for a smoother hand-off to the next.
This role is responsible for taking care of all tools, processes, pipelines, and methodologies required for deploying the cloud software. DevOps engineers will be configuring and setting up the necessary cloud resources, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking. They also ensure that the migrated infrastructure and applications are configured for optimal performance and scalability. Finally, they will be responsible for implementing processes for ongoing management and maintenance of the migrated infrastructure and applications, including monitoring, alerting, and remediation. The devops team structure can vary from one company to another, with different roles and responsibilities allocated based on their cloud migration project needs. When building a cloud operations team, consider the individual skills of each member, as well as the collective experience and knowledge needed to pull off a cloud migration project successfully.
Harness the full potential of AI for your business
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. It doesn’t have to be someone with “manager” in their title, but anyone willing to convince skeptical team members to start bridging the gap between their team and an outside team, whether it be developers, operations, or a platform team. The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches.
