If You Are Doing These DevOps Things, You Are Doing It Completely Wrong
Before I start talking about the incorrect DevOps practices, let us first understand what It is, its goals, and its benefits.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a widely used buzzword in today’s time. So, what is it all about? Is it a tool/technology or a framework? Well, it is none of these. Let me start by giving you a clear picture. Suppose you are working in a tech company, and you must deliver a software product. Once your development team is done with their work and sample tests, the product is sent over to the deployment or the operations team.
Most of the time, the deployment is a long process filled with a blame game between the development teams and the operations team. The operations team blames the development team’s code for the deployment while the Development team blames the Operations team’s servers. It got introduced to stop us from encountering these awkward scenarios.
DevOps stands for Development and Operations Collaboration. It is a strategy or a methodology that bridges the gap between the Development Team and the Operations team. It is a practice in which the development teams and the operations team work together for the entire project cycle. It facilitates continuous integration and delivery and getting feedback from the stakeholders in the early stages.
Goals
As I mentioned earlier, It facilitates improved communication between the development and operations teams to deliver a project promptly and successfully.
The goals of DevOps are mentioned as follows
- Increasing the frequency of deployments by increasing the quality of the product with each deployment.
- Reducing failure rates and associated risks.
- Focusing on improving business by increasing productivity.
- Meeting the business and customer requirements of the client.
- Improving the meantime to recovery.
Now let us talk about the wrong DevOps practices.
If you have employed these practices, then you are doing it wrong!
- “Let’s have a DevOps Team”
If you are doing this, then you have just got the entire meaning of DevOps wrong. As I mentioned earlier, It is not a tool or technology. Your organization can have an “Android team” or a “Full-Stack team” because they will be working on those specific technologies. It is neither a tool nor a technology but a strategy for increased collaboration. It just cannot have a team. It is a way of making your development and operations team work closely.
- “I need to buy DevOps”
This is as bad as the first point. DevOps is not a resource that needs to be bought. For sure, you can invest by hiring a consultant for a while to learn its principles, but you cannot buy it because it isn’t proprietary software. DevOps is a practice and can be brought into effect only with the right mindset.
- “Tools for DevOps is all there is in DevOps”
There are tools like Chef or Puppet that aid you with DevOps, but they are only a part of the entire process. These tools certainly help establish that culture, and you should have them, but It focuses on several things and areas. Just having these tools as your solution for implementing DevOps is not the way.
But also, you need tools like Cloudanix.com to ensure that your team members are not wasting their time and energy in grunt work. It’s better to leverage their talent to address business goals.
- “Let’s do the work manually”
Automation is a crucial principle while implementing DevOps. Organizations that practice DevOps have a strong desire to automate everything. Automation removes human errors that might be introduced by manual work. You must employ automation in testing. If you have co-workers and senior management who say things like “Let’s manually use checklists to manage code deployments” or stuff like that, you are doing DevOps wrong!
- “Low deployment frequency”
One of the underlying philosophies in DevOps is fixing bugs and releasing new features faster. Implementing this is getting gradually closer to a fully continuous deployment model. If you have an organization that releases code once in a blue moon, then you’re doing it wrong!
Treat your development team right: In short, don’t consider the development team as a financial burden. Invest in them and provide them with the necessary tools to ease their work.
The Blame Game
I started this article by talking about blame games and deployment problems faced by the operations team. It cannot be implemented by blaming individuals or teams for failure. It’s the system’s fault. And by the system here, I mean the resources. A blameless culture is a necessity in DevOps.
A House Divided
Okay, hear me out. What I mean by this is very much the definition of DevOps. You cannot have the development team on one floor and the operations team on the other, and the only mode of communication between them is the code commit messages. It would also help if you had your operations and development teams on talking terms with one another. If that is not the case, then you are doing It wrong! It is all about collaboration between the development teams and the operations team.
That does not mean you go to extremes and force them to eat lunch together, invite each other to their baby showers or ask them to host a garden party for the other. That is not the point here. Professional team-building activities should be conducted to harbor a healthy work environment between them.
To conclude, I’ll say that this is a process in which there is always room for improvement. Making use of more practices and integrating them into your DevOps process will only be beneficial for you and your organization.