This article is based on insights originally published by enterprisersproject.com, featuring commentary from DevOps practitioners across multiple organizations.
The Remote DevOps Challenge
DevOps is widely understood to be as much a cultural shift as a technical one. Now layer in the reality that more IT work is carried out by geographically dispersed teams, and the cultural challenges multiply quickly. Two trends that are difficult on their own become genuinely hard when combined: driving a DevOps mindset across an organization while keeping remote team members aligned, motivated, and productive.
Mark Runyon, principal consultant at Improving, has argued that one reliable health indicator for a DevOps culture is how physically close team members are. In an ideal scenario, a scrum team is within arm’s reach of one another — able to call an impromptu meeting, break off to whiteboard a solution, or remove a blocker in real time. That proximity also builds interpersonal bonds that are harder to form at a distance.
Why Co-location Isn’t Always Realistic
The case for co-located teams is compelling, but it runs into practical constraints almost immediately in large enterprises. Helen Beal, DevOpsologist at Ranger4, puts it plainly:
“When organizations are very large, with tens of thousands of people in technology teams, even if they are in the same country they will be across multiple locations, potentially hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Additionally, many organizations outsource parts of the value stream — development, testing, and operations — frequently to different countries. The cost of changing these models is huge, incredibly disruptive, and causes a lot of headaches for HR. Most people can’t or don’t want to move to another city or country, and they shouldn’t be expected to.”
— Helen Beal, DevOpsologist, Ranger4
This is especially true for organizations transitioning from siloed, waterfall structures toward small, autonomous squads. The journey itself is disruptive enough without requiring wholesale relocation of staff.
Where Remote DevOps Teams Can Excel
The barriers of distributed work are real, but overcoming them builds organizational muscle that pays dividends later. Hina Popal, senior agile practitioner and Scrum Master at Red Hat, explains:
“There is a bigger upfront cost when forming a remote team, but through this process people learn to become experts at collaboration and flexibility. When teams work through all of these difficult problems, they have already faced some of their hardest challenges. That means they can handle many things as a team because they went through these experiences upfront.”
— Hina Popal, Senior Agile Practitioner and Scrum Master, Red Hat
Robert Reeves, CTO of Datical, goes further, challenging the assumption that physical proximity is inherently superior:
“Remote Agile/DevOps work is not just possible; it works. I’ve seen developers in the same room use Slack to communicate. I have also seen impromptu Slack calls across continents. Having the team in arm’s reach also perpetuates a DevOps anti-pattern: enforcing the need for face time with the boss. As a manager, if you feel the need to physically see your team in order to gauge their progress, your ability to measure productivity via KPIs is really bad.”
— Robert Reeves, CTO, Datical
5 Practical Tips for Managing Remote DevOps Teams
The following five practices, drawn from experienced DevOps leaders, address the cultural and operational gaps that distributed teams commonly face.
1. Get Teams Together Periodically
Remote work offers real benefits — cost savings, productivity gains, and improved quality of life — but occasional in-person time pays outsized dividends. Helen Beal recommends bringing team members together for a few days each quarter:
“Just a small amount of face time with people helps build the relationships in a way that sticks. The remote working works even better when the human feels they know the other human, no matter where in the world they may be.”
— Helen Beal, Ranger4
Even one or two on-site sessions per year can meaningfully improve the quality of day-to-day remote collaboration throughout the rest of the year.
2. Invest in the Right Tools
Remote DevOps doesn’t fail because of geography — it fails when teams lack the infrastructure to collaborate effectively. Matt Poepsel, Senior Vice President at The Predictive Index, describes his organization’s approach:
“We use gobs of tech tools to support our remote workers. We make extensive use of G-Suite, Zoom web conferencing, GitHub, Google Jamboards, Slack, virtual Miro brainstorming boards, Owl video conferencing, and anything else we can get our hands on to make remote work more productive and enjoyable.”
— Matt Poepsel, SVP, The Predictive Index
The specific tools matter less than the commitment to tooling as a first-class concern. Identify friction points in your team’s workflow and apply tooling deliberately to address them.
3. Over-communicate
In co-located environments, a huge volume of communication happens passively — overheard conversations, body language, hallway check-ins. Remote teams must replace that ambient signal with deliberate communication. Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, explains how his distributed-first company approaches this:
“One of the intentions we explicitly agreed upon was over-communicating, and it has proven to be extremely useful. Starting out as a widely-distributed team of mostly folks who had never met in person, we hoped over-communication would help us at least avoid not communicating enough, and, at best, figure out what communication level we need.”
— Rob Zuber, CTO, CircleCI
Practical steps include defaulting to written documentation, using persistent chat channels per project or topic, and erring on the side of sharing context even when it feels redundant.
4. Make Meetings Intentional
Remote meetings that default to the same format as in-person meetings fail remote participants. Matt Poepsel advocates for structuring meetings around their purpose before they begin:
“We teach our meeting leaders to think about the nature of their meeting prior to kickoff. Is it a brainstorming meeting? How can we use a virtual whiteboard? Do we need to make a decision? How will we gather critical inputs from remote team members? If one person is remote, we try to make sure every person in the meeting is visible on camera. We always give the speaking right-of-way to remote workers before those in the room.”
— Matt Poepsel, The Predictive Index
The guiding principle here is equity: remote participants should never feel like second-class attendees in a room-first meeting format.
5. Explore Asynchronous Ways of Working
Distributed teams that span multiple time zones can turn asynchronous work from a limitation into a competitive advantage. Rob Zuber describes a practice his team calls “ping-pong pairing”:
“It is similar in principle to traditional pair-programming, but asynchronous. Rather than navigating and commenting on code the other person is writing in real time and switching driver/navigator roles often, we let our respective daily schedules dictate the rhythm. This still retains the usual pair-programming benefit of knowledge sharing, while actually allowing more than two people to participate in the process.”
— Rob Zuber, CTO, CircleCI
Asynchronous collaboration patterns — async code review, written design proposals, recorded demos — can reduce the synchronization overhead that burns remote teams out, while keeping quality and knowledge-sharing high.
The Long-term Payoff
Teams that invest the effort upfront to build remote-first practices tend to arrive at a durable, resilient culture. Zuber shared a telling anecdote: during an in-person offsite, his team asked themselves whether they would choose to remain distributed across distant time zones or prefer to work more closely together. Their answer was unanimous — they wouldn’t change a thing.
That kind of cohesion doesn’t happen by accident. It is the product of deliberate tooling choices, communication norms, meeting discipline, and the willingness to invest in occasional face-to-face time. For DevOps teams facing the reality of distributed work, these five practices provide a solid foundation to build on.