Demystifying DevOps profession - The Wall Diagram theory

Updated - 2 min read

The Wall Diagram theory is an innovative concept to demystify the DevOps profession and to understand the key roles of DevOps in an organization. First, let's try to make a proper definition of an organization. An organization is a structure that is composed of multiple teams, where each team performs a specific set of tasks. So, a team is very important component of the organization. Let's list few important teams in an organization and their tasks.

  • Software Development (Dev): The key task of this team is to develop the software source code which is the bussiness logic.
  • Quality Analysis: The main role of this team is to test the features and functionalities of the software product to ensure quality.
  • Performance Engineering: This team is reponsible for benchmarking and improving the performance of every component in the production.
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): The key role of this team is to ensure 99.99% uptime for services running in the production, including observability.
  • Network Operations Center (NOC): This team is responsible for setting, configuring, and managing monitoring systems, dashboards, alerts, etc.
  • Data Engineering: The key task is to analyze data, to build, train Machine Learning models, AI, etc.
  • Support: The key role of this team is to interaction with the customers and solve their issues.
  • Security: This team is responsible for securing the services running in the production. They care about the encryption of data in transit & rest, and access management, etc.
  • Release: The main role of this team is to create software releases that can be deployed in production servers.
  • Infra: The key task of this team is to provision and manage infrastructure components like servers, containers, networks, storage, etc.  They also do perform software deployments in the production environment.

These are the main tech teams available in an organization. To better understand the DevOps profession, we need to do a quick comparison between the components of a wall with the components of an organization. In a wall, the bricks and cement are the two main components. Here, we compare an organization with the wall and teams with the bricks. If it's correct to compare wall with organization and bricks with teams, then we can compare cement with DevOps.

The cement is an integral part of the wall and acts as a glue to combine bricks. Similarly, the DevOps team is an integral part of an organization. The DevOps team plays a cementing role in an organization to ensure integration and collaboration within different teams. That's why DevOps is a multi-skill and multi-team oriented job role. A DevOps professional must have the mindset to work with multiple teams performing their tasks as well. So, a DevOps professional needs to have immense knowledge about the key roles and tasks of other teams.

Hence, The Wall Diagram theory allows us to demystify of the DevOps profession and its key roles in an organization. There are lots of information on the internet, most of them are misleading and complex to understand. That's why we created The Wall Diagram theory to simplify the understanding of the DevOps job role.

Hope it helps. Thank you.

DevOps
Observability
SRE
APM
Deployment
Infrastructure

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