The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

by Gene Kim

organizations optimize for expertise, division of labor, or reducing cost. These organizations centralize expertise, which helps enable career growth and skill development, and often have tall hierarchical organizational structures. This has been the prevailing method of organization for Operations (i.e., server admins, network admins, database admins, and so forth are all organized into separate groups). Matrix-oriented organizations attempt to combine functional and market orientation. However, as many who work in or manage matrix organizations observe, matrix organizations often result in complicated organizational structures, such as individual contributors reporting to two managers or more, and sometimes achieving neither of the goals of functional or market orientation. Market-oriented organizations optimize for responding quickly to customer needs. These organizations tend to be flat, composed of multiple, cross-functional disciplines (e.g., marketing, engineering, etc.), which often lead to potential redundancies across the organization. This is how many prominent organizations adopting DevOps operate—in extreme examples, such as at Amazon or Netflix, each service team is simultaneously responsible for feature delivery and service support.§