A successful joint-ownership model between DevOps and Software Development teams requires a clear division of responsibilities that promotes collaboration, accountability, and efficient incident resolution.

Guiding Principles for Joint Ownership

Joint ownership means shared goals and continuous communication, while outlining specific responsibilities for each team.

For both teams, consider the following shared principles:

Shared Responsibility for Service Health: Both teams are invested in the reliability, performance, and availability of the service.

Blameless Postmortems: Focus on process and system improvements rather than individual blame during incidents.

Automation First: Prioritize automating repetitive tasks and manual toil.

Continuous Improvement: Regularly review processes, tools, and team performance to identify areas for enhancement.

SLO-Driven Development & Operations: Introduce and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to define acceptable service performance and guide priorities.

DevOps Team Responsibilities

The DevOps team will primarily focus on the infrastructure, deployment pipelines, observability, and overall operational health of the service.

Infrastructure Management

• Provisioning, configuring, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure (e.g., VMs, containers, cloud services, networking) where the service runs.
• Managing infrastructure as code (IaC) templates and ensuring their consistency.
• Implementing and maintaining disaster recovery and backup strategies.
• Capacity planning and scaling infrastructure to meet demand.

Deployment Pipeline Ownership & Automation

• Designing, building, and maintaining robust CI/CD pipelines for the service.
• Ensuring automated testing integration within the pipeline.
• Implementing blue/green deployments, canary releases, or other advanced deployment strategies.
• Managing deployment tools and platforms.

Observability & Monitoring

• Setting up and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting systems for the service.
• Defining key metrics (e.g., latency, error rate, throughput, saturation) in collaboration with the Software Development team.
• Managing observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog).
• Establishing alert thresholds and notification mechanisms.

On-Call & Incident Management (Primary)

• Being the primary on-call responders for service-related incidents.
• Initial triage, investigation, and diagnosis of incidents.
• Escalating to the Software Development team when code-level expertise is required.
• Implementing temporary mitigations and workarounds during incidents.
• Documenting incident timelines and actions taken.

Security & Compliance (Infrastructure Level)

• Implementing security best practices for the infrastructure.
• Managing access controls and credentials.
• Ensuring infrastructure compliance with organizational policies and regulations.

Tooling & Platform Management

• Evaluating, selecting, and maintaining tools used for operations, monitoring, and deployment.
• Providing support and expertise on these tools to the Software Development team.

Service Level Objective (SLO) Definition & Tracking (Operational Aspects)

• Collaborating with the Software Development team to define and track SLOs related to operational performance (e.g., uptime, response time of the infrastructure).
• Reporting on SLO adherence from an infrastructure perspective.

Software Development Team Responsibilities

The Software Development team will focus on the application logic, code quality, functional correctness, and performance of the service.

Code Ownership & Quality

• Writing, testing, reviewing, and submitting high-quality code for the service.
• Ensuring unit, integration, and end-to-end tests are comprehensive and effective.
• Adhering to coding standards and best practices.
• Maintaining code documentation.

Application Architecture & Design

• Designing the application’s architecture to be scalable, resilient, and maintainable.
• Making technology stack decisions for the application.

Application Performance & Optimization

• Optimizing application code for performance and resource efficiency.
• Identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks within the application.
• Conducting load and stress testing on the application.

Feature Development & Bug Fixing

• Developing new features and functionalities for the service.
• Prioritizing and fixing application-level bugs.

Application Logging, Metrics & Tracing

• Implementing comprehensive logging within the application, providing relevant context for debugging.
• Emitting application-specific metrics that are crucial for understanding service health (e.g., business metrics, internal queue sizes, API call counts).
• Implementing distributed tracing within the application to aid in understanding request flows.
• Ensuring logs and metrics are easily consumable by the observability stack.

On-Call & Incident Management (Escalation & Deep Dive)

• Being secondary on-call responders, available for escalation from the DevOps team when incidents require deep application-level expertise or code changes.
• Performing root cause analysis for application-related issues.
• Implementing immediate code fixes or workarounds during incidents.
• Participating in blameless postmortems and contributing to action items related to the application.

Service Level Objective (SLO) Definition & Tracking (Application Aspects)

• Collaborating with the DevOps team to define and track SLOs related to the user experience and application functionality (e.g., login success rate, transaction completion time).
• Reporting on SLO adherence from an application perspective.

Security & Compliance (Application Level)

• Implementing secure coding practices.
• Addressing security vulnerabilities identified within the application code.
• Ensuring application compliance with data privacy and security regulations.

Joint Responsibilities

Together, both teams share and collaborate on the following responsibilities:

• Service Level Objective (SLO) Definition & Review: Both teams must jointly define, review, and agree upon SLOs for the service, encompassing both operational and application aspects. These SLOs should drive priorities for both teams.
• Release Planning & Management: Collaborative planning of releases, including understanding dependencies, potential risks, and rollback strategies.
• Post-Mortem & Incident Review: Joint participation in blameless post-mortems to identify systemic issues and collaborate on preventative measures and improvements.
• Documentation: Both teams are responsible for contributing to and maintaining comprehensive service documentation, runbooks, and architectural diagrams.
• Knowledge Sharing & Training: Regular sessions to share knowledge, best practices, and new technologies. DevOps can train developers on operational tools, and developers can train DevOps on application internals.
• Tooling Integration: Ensuring seamless integration between development tools (IDEs, SCM) and operational tools (CI/CD, monitoring).
• Cost Management: Joint responsibility for optimizing cloud resource usage and managing service costs.

By clearly defining the responsibilities for each team, as well as those that are shared, while also emphasizing collaboration and shared goals, this joint-ownership model can foster a more resilient, efficient, and accountable approach to service management within the organization.