DevOps mistakes which developers should avoid!

Importance of DevOps in today’s world

DevOps often describes a culture and a set of processes which brings development and operations together to complete software development. It enables organizations not just to create but also improve products at a faster pace than they can with some approaches to software development. DevOps adoption rate is increasing by each passing day. According to Statista many business organizations are shifting towards the DevOps culture and there is an increase of 17% in 2018 from the previous year. 

DevOps culture is instrumental in today’s world. The following points briefly highlight the need for DevOps in this era.

• It reduces costs and other IT stuff.
• Results in greater competencies.
• It provides better communication and cooperation opportunities.
• The development cycle is fast and innovative.
• Deployment failures are reduced to a great extent.

Eight DevOps Mistakes

Many people still don’t fully understand what DevOps means. Without prior knowledge and understanding, many DevOps initiatives fail to get off the ground successfully. Following is a brief description of DevOps’ mistakes, and how they can be avoided to start a successful DevOps journey.

1. Rigid DevOps Process

Compliance with core DevOps tenets is vital for DevOps success; organizations have to make adjustments in active response to meet organization demands. Enterprises have to make sure that while the main DevOps pillars remain stable while implementing DevOps; they make the internal adjustments needed in internal benchmarking of the expected consequences.

Instrumenting codebases in a gritty manner and making them more and more partitioned results in more flexibility and provide DevOps team the ultimate power to backtrack and recognize the root cause of diversion in the event of failed outcomes. But, all adjustments have to be made while staying within the boundaries defined by DevOps.

2. Oversimplification of the process

Indeed DevOps is a complex process. To implement DevOps, enterprises often go on a DevOps Engineer hiring spree or at times, create a new and isolated one. The DevOps department is then responsible for managing the DevOps framework and strategy, and it needlessly adds new processes that are often lengthy and complicated.

Instead of creating an isolated DevOps department, organizations should focus on optimizing their processes to make operational products that leverage the right set of resources. For successful implementation of DevOps, organizations must be capable enough to manage the DevOps framework, leverage functional experts, and other resources that can manage DevOps related tasks like budgeting goals, resource management, and process tracking.

DevOps requires a cultural overhaul. Organizations must consider a phased and measured transition to DevOps implementation by educating and training employees on these new processes. Also, they should have the right frameworks to enable careful collaboration.

3. Not preparing for a cultural change

When you have the right tools for DevOps practices, you likely might come across a new challenge. The challenge will be trying to make your teams use the tools for fast development, continuous delivery, automated testing, and monitoring. Is your DevOps culture ready for all such things?

For example, agile methodologies usually mandate that you ship new code once a week, or once a day. It results in the failure of agile methods. You might also face the same conceptual issues with DevOps. It can be like pulling on a smooth road with a car with no fuel in it.

To prevent this situation, plan for a transition period. Leave enough time for the development and operational team to get used to new practices. Also, make sure that they have a chance to gain experience with the new processes and tools. Ensure that before adopting DevOps, you've got a matured Dev and Ops culture.

4. Creating a single DevOps team

The most common mistake which most organizations and enterprises make is to create a brand-new team and task them with addressing all the burdens of a DevOps initiative. It is challenging and complicated for both development and operations to deal with a new group that coordinates with everyone.

DevOps started with the idea of enhancing collaborations between teams involved in the development of software like security, DBMS, and QA. However, it is not only about development and operations. If you create a new side to address DevOps, you’re making things more complicated.

The secret ingredient here is simplicity. Focus on culture by encouraging a mindset of automation, quality, and stability. For instance, you might involve everyone in a conversation regarding your architecture, or about some problems found in production environments in which all the relevant players need to be well aware of how their work influences others.

“DevOps is not about a single dedicated team but about organizations that progress together as a DevOps team.”

Unlock access to the largest independent learning library in Tech for FREE!

Get unlimited access to 7500+ expert-authored eBooks and video courses covering every tech area you can think of.

Renews at $19.99/month. Cancel anytime

START FREE TRIAL

5. Not including the security team

DevOps is about more than merely putting the development and operations teams together. It is a continuous process of automation and software development, including audit, compliance, and security. Many organizations make the mistake of not following their security practices in advance.

According to a CA Technologies survey, security concerns were the number-one obstacle to DevOps as cited by 38% of the respondents. Similarly, the Puppet survey found that high-performing DevOps teams spend 50% less time remediating security issues than low performers. These high performing teams found different ways to communicate their security objectives and to establish security in the early phases of their development process.

All DevOps practitioners should evaluate the controls, recognize the risks, and understand the processes. In the end, security is always an integral part of DevOps practices, such as DevSecOps (a practice in which development and operations is integrated with security). For example, if you have some security issues in production, you can address them within your DevOps pipeline through the tools which the security team already uses. DevOps and security practices should be followed strictly, and there should be no compromises. Moreover, other measures should be adopted to avoid cyber-criminals invading the DevOps culture. Invest in cybersecurity markets has become a necessity to avoid situations where attacker can carry out attacks like that of spear phishing and phishing. It is found that out of all attacks on various organizations, 95% of them were a result of spear phishing.

6. Incorrect use of incident management

DevOps teams must have a robust incident management process in place. The incident management needs to be utterly proactive and an ongoing process. It means that having a documented incident management process is imperative to define the incident responses.

For example, a total downtime event will have a different response workflow in comparison to a minor latency problem. The failure to not do so can often lead to missed timelines and preventable projects delay.

7. Not utilizing purposeful automation

DevOps needs organizations to adopt and implement purposeful automation. For DevOps, it is essential to take automation across the complete development lifecycle. It includes continuous delivery, continuous integration, and deployment for velocity and quality outcomes.

Purposeful end-to-end automation is a crucial successful DevOps implementation. Therefore, organizations should look at the complete automation of the CI and CD pipeline. However, at the same time, organizations need to identify various opportunities for automation across functions and processes. This helps to reduce the need for manual handoffs for complicated integrations that need new management in multiple format deployments.

8. Wrong-way to measure project success

DevOps promises for faster delivery. But, if that acceleration comes at the cost of quality, then the DevOps program is a failure. Enterprises looking at deploying DevOps should use the right metrics to understand project growth and success.

For this reason, it is imperative to consider metrics that align velocity with success. Do focus on the right parameters as it is essential to drive intelligent automation decisions.

Conclusion

Now organizations are rapidly running towards DevOps to stand with competition and become successful but they often make big mistakes. There are mistakes that people commit while implementing a DevOps culture. However, all these mistakes are avoidable, and hopefully, the points mentioned above have successfully cleared your vision to a great extent.

After you overcome all the mistakes and adopt DevOps practices, your organization will surely enjoy improved client satisfaction, and employee morale increased productivity, and agility- all of which helps in growing your business.

If you plan to accelerate deployment of high-quality software by automating build and releases using CI/CD pipelines in Azure, we suggest you to check out Azure DevOps Server 2019 Cookbook - Second Edition, which will help you create and release extensions to the Azure DevOps marketplace and reach the million-strong developer ecosystem for feedback.

Author Bio

Rebecca James is an enthusiastic cybersecurity journalist. A creative team leader, editor of PrivacyCrypts.

Abel Wang explains the relationship between DevOps and Cloud-Native

Can DevOps promote empathy in software engineering?

7 crucial DevOps metrics that you need to track