I will admit I have been a strong opponent of those listing roles and organizations as DevOps. Primarily because DevOps is a way to do something and creating a role DevOps Engineer is just putting lipstick on the pig for those looking to hire a Linux Sysadmin or infrastructure script coder. Likewise, the DevOps organization is a somewhat more likeable term, but still ambiguous at best. It’s either the organization that is helping to redefine IT by having development and operations individuals work together on the same team, which is really just IT using a different process and should go away once it succeeds, or it’s the infrastructure team trying to sound cooler and more sexy.

Today, however, I had a bit of epiphany about using DevOps with regard to a title or role in an organization. I was thinking about a project I was on where we used agile Scrum methodology. On that team we had a Scrum Master whose job it was to orchestrate the agile process and helped the team to move through the various stages of the agile process. This was a very important role that analyzed the velocity of the project, helped to prioritize stories and figure out how many points would be finished in each sprint.

This particular project also leveraged a process of continuous build, which meant that someone had to manage the establishment of the code repository and develop the automated test and build processes. This was a critical aspect of ensuring that every developer was checking in code that passed unit testing. Once a day there was also an integrated build, which would deliver a working version for testing, hopefully.

It’s this supportive environment that ensures that the development team is indeed able to complete their sprints and deliver high-quality software at the end of the process. So, if DevOps is an agile methodology, then who is responsible for clearing the hurdles for the development and operations teams to work more closely together? Who is responsible for instituting the tools that will help automate the collaboration between these two teams?

The people I speak to that are moving to DevOps (or helping businesses move to DevOps) all claim that it’s currently working one of three ways:

• DevOps is really infrastructure/data center led and they select the tools and DevOps is really about automation of provisioning
• DevOps is really development driven and the application development team is selecting the tools, which are really just extending current agile approaches
• The development and operations teams are evaluating together and struggling to select a single platform that meets both of their interests

All this brought me to the realization that successful DevOps implementations will require a DevOps Master. This individual, like the Scrum Master, is responsible for implementing the necessary processes and procedures that will allow these two teams to do their individual tasks and yet have their work culminate in a high-quality production delivery. The DevOps Master will choose the platform(s) to enable this collaboration and manage the individuals who will set up the environment. In essence, they will build the bridge that development and operations will use to facilitate communication and automation of the design, build, test, operate process.