To improve the speed and velocity of your software development processes, you need a high functioning DevOps team. This can be made up of different roles such as build engineers, SREs, networking and infrastructure engineers, cloud architects, and testers.
If you’re thinking about using a freelance model to hire critical tech and IT roles on-demand and reduce your bench spend, Fiverr Enterprise provides an IT talent pool, curated especially for you – one place where you can gain instant access to your own carefully vetted Dev & IT talent, that’s ready-to-hire and able to meet your business requirements.
In this article, we’ll discuss the core components of a DevOps team, their roles and responsibilities, and how to increase efficiencies with on-demand tech talent.
This article is part of our guide on talent management.
What Is a DevOps Team?
In a DevOps team, the development teams and the operations teams are not two siloed departments, but instead one functioning whole. Engineers take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of any application, and often integrate tightly with security and QA teams as well to create a more agile and sleek journey from end-to-end.
DevOps teams are often known for automation of traditionally manual processes, onboarding smart technology and tools that help them to work faster, pushing updates and fixes continuously, and working both independently and collaboratively to speed up timelines.
The Importance of DevOps Teams and Practices
There are a number of benefits that you can gain from making the cultural shift and onboarding a DevOps mindset for your teams.
- Time to value: A DevOps release schedule uses continuous delivery and continuous integration pipelines (CI/CD). This means that deliverables can be pushed out far more frequently, without sacrificing reliability. A high performing DevOps team can release software 417 times more often than those who don’t embrace DevOps successfully.
- Collaboration: As Development and Operations teams are no longer siloed, there is naturally better collaboration in a DevOps team. This is especially true if security and QA are also tightly integrated. Instead of waiting on bottlenecks or completing handoffs regularly, one team has responsibility as a whole.
- Competitive advantage: With continuous deployment and continuous integration, regular releases help your IT business get to the front of the market faster. You’re also quickest to fix bugs and offer updates – often before the customer or client even notices an issue.
- High quality work: Better collaboration and smarter processes help to improve the underlying quality of work and effort. By integrating security with a shift-left mentality, products are secure by design, rather than considered as an add-on at the end of the build.
Roles and Responsibilities on DevOps teams
DevOps teams can vary depending on the kind of IT business you run, and the specific needs of customers and clients. However, here are some common roles and responsibilities you may need to onboard:
- A DevOps Evangelist: Change management is hard! The DevOps evangelist will be your DevOps champion inside the company, sharing the benefits, and supporting a culture of failing fast.
- DevOps Engineers: Also called Automation Architects, your engineers are hands-on roles, deploying and maintaining infrastructure. They will be responsible for CI/CD pipelines, cloud migrations and monitoring and onboarding technical solutions.
- Software Engineers/Testers: Developers are usually a step removed from software engineers, working on more specific products or features. They test, deploy, monitor and fix the areas of the software they are responsible for.
- Quality Assurance Experts: QA involves setting the quality standards for the build. These stakeholders may design and run tests to see if features meet specifications, assess risks, define requirements, and have a focus on user experience.
- Product Owner: This function connects the customers to the DevOps teams, providing feedback, defining the vision for the product, managing the backlog, and making progress calls.
- Security and Compliance Officers/Engineers: When your DevOps team is a DevSecOps team, security and compliance engineers define the security requirements and integrate these early and continuously during the build.
Challenges Faced by DevOps Teams
These six roles are just the tip of the iceberg for DevOps teams. Depending on the industry or the product, you may need specialists for mobile, IoT, VR/AR, AI, or any number of other platforms and use cases. There are dozens of programming languages, niche skills, and client requirements that could have you coming up empty in terms of skills.
This is one of the greatest challenges for today’s IT and tech companies. It’s impossible to have all the right skills in-house all of the time, especially if you need to serve multiple client or product needs. A lean DevOps team works in a more agile way, and the sheer expense of keeping dozens of specialists in-house can be prohibitively expensive.
Tips for Increasing Efficiency of DevOps Teams with Fiverr Enterprise
To increase efficiency, many companies are turning to outsourced expertise and freelance talent to meet their skills gaps on-demand. After all, with a freelance strategy, companies can hire exactly who they need for a specific project, and only pay them for their time or work. This allows any IT company to keep a core in-house lean team, but doesn’t narrow down the expertise they have available.
This is exactly where Fiverr Enterprise found its gap in the market. A complete Freelancer Management Solution (FMS), you can use Fiverr Enterprise to source and hire any tech expertise, eliminate resource uncertainty, reduce hiring costs and maintain a consistent and quality workforce. Our SaaS solution enables you to confidently take on more projects, knowing you have a dedicated talent pool that’s always available.
For growing DevOps teams, Fiverr Enterprise allows you to:
Hire any tech expertise, fast
Need to move fast with a client project or a pressing software dilemma? Our white-glove sourcing and hiring service will deliver you top tech talent that’s both available to hire immediately and completely trustworthy, in just 48 hours.
Stay in budget and keep a lean DevOps team
Stop maintaining an expensive bench of DevOps talent in-house, and cut full-time hires down to your core competencies. Only pay for billable workers when you need them, without any agency fees or markups to work with preferred freelancers over and over again.
Access a global, vetted talent pool
Augment your DevOps teams with platform engineers, cloud engineers, UX expertise, AI gurus, data scientists or specialized automation expertise. Hire based on specific needs, and get the best talent, regardless of where they are in the world.
Intrigued? Schedule 30 minutes with one of our workforce experts and they can walk you through how it works.