Devops team management strategies for the distribution of duties and workload.

Participating in various projects, I have met completely different distribution of roles in devops teams.By definition, a devops engineer must work closely with developers, and therefore the scheme of one devops per team of 6-7 developers is quite common.

In this case, the devops engineer is part of the development team, participates in daily meetings, works as part of the team sprint, etc.

At the same time, if he is not the only devops in the company, then he practically does not concern infrastructure issues, but options are possible

When the staff of devops engineers is more than three people, then you can meet the option of dividing the team into DEV and Ops parts. In this case, the dev team is just involved in developer support, deployment, automation of development processes, at the same time, the ops team is engaged in infrastructure access, monitoring, infrastructure optimization and process automation within this infrastructure.

If you have a large staff of devops engineers, then you can form not only two teams. This is an approach in which each mini team of devops engineers is engaged only in its own direction. One team is building infrastructure, another is supporting developers, a third team is exclusively engaged in CI / СD processes and releases, there may also be a team that focuses on R&D and develops new tools for the project, a team of monitoring engineers, a team of security engineers. Most likely, this approach is valid for really huge projects, because there are risks associated with interchangeability

In any case, the division of the team in different directions is not the only way. In many devops projects, the team works in all directions at once, and each member of the team can be involved in infrastructure maintenance and monitoring. 

This gives some interchangeability, but my opinion can affect efficiency. In the end, each specialist has his own strengths and weaknesses, everyone prefers to work with something more with something less. Why not put it to good use.

At times we may come across a role reversal approach. Quite often there is an approach in which several engineers of the team during a selected period of time are engaged in only one direction and then change with others. This can often be seen in monitoring work, because monitoring is an important part and sometimes you need to react with lightning speed, so dedicated engineers stand out in projects.

Before choosing one or another approach, it is worth taking into account many factors, from the level of the team to the specifics of the project and the requirements of the business. It may be worth trying several approaches to find the most effective formula for working specifically for your project.