While many companies are eager to adopt DevOps workflows and best practices, there are several mistakes that must be avoided when implementing core DevOps principles. As a DevOps services provider https://itsvit.com/services/devops/ with more than 5 years of experience, we can list the main steps of adopting DevOps principles and mistakes you must avoid doing.
Let’s first discuss what the DevOps is all about.
DevOps is an approach to practical optimization of IT lifecycle and operations. DevOps principles and practices emphasize the elimination of all kinds of waste, such as any unproductive time spent idly waiting, time wasted on developing deprecated features, time wasted on repetitive and routine tasks, etc. Automation helps reduce the amount of time spent on such activities to minimum or zero.
This can be achieved through implementing 3 core DevOps principles:
- Collaboration. Developers and Ops engineers communicate and discuss the future product structure, the way it will operate and scale, how best to ensure its security and monitoring efficiency and how to build the most resource- and cost-efficient IT workflows. Instead of “throwing the code over the wall”, DevOps is all about making the software delivery process easier for all the parties involved.
- Culture. DevOps architecture principles are based on Agile and Lean paradigms. DevOps culture emphasizes creativity and experimentation in constant search of the ways to improvement. Most importantly, a failure is not someone’s fault, it is an indicator of a system flaw that must be analyzed and fixed, so such a situation cannot happen again. In the end of the day, it is important “what we learned today”, not “whos fault is this?” This attitude helps DevOps engineers think out of the box and experiment to improve the workflows and achieve better results with less effort.
- Technology. DevOps is centered on delivering the most value to the customers through rapid feedback implementation, reducing time-to-market for new product features, minimizing the IT infrastructure management expenses and adjusting the system to ensure ease of updates should the need be. This is achieved through using open-source technology like Terraform and Kubernetes, Docker and Jenkins to build cloud-agnostic modular architectures that emphasize automation of repetitive low-value operations to maximize the DevOps team value input.
These 3 core DevOps principles outline the basis of any IT outsourcing project and why it often becomes a transformational experience for the whole business. However, there also are several mistakes that many companies make when trying to implement DevOps.
Common DevOps implementation mistakes
- DevOps is not magic. It is not enough to have Devs and Ops engineers sit in one room and share the toolset to make them DevOps. They should share the mindset, so that changes are desired and failure is not fatal (at least where IT infrastructure is concerned, as servers are treated as cattle, not pets and can be easily reconfigured). Thus said, transition from Waterfall to DevOps does not happen overnight by itself, it is a time-consuming and harsh work best done under guidance of experienced DevOps specialists.
- DevOps is not toolkit. It is not enough to buy some proprietary and master some open-source DevOps tools to be able to state you now follow the principles of flow DevOps. The developers must think of how the app will run, and the Ops must understand how the code is written and how to make the release process better — only then the whole team can fully commit to DevOps transformation.
- DevOps is not taught at courses. None amount of pushy “DevOps gurus” can teach your IT department to become DevOps through presentations or on conferences. Only working DevOps engineers can share their hands-on experience and tach the basic approaches to working the DevOps way. This is why many companies instate Centers of Excellence, where the teams from the managed DevOps Services Providers explain how to use DevOps tools best and how to design and implement cloud infrastructures in the most efficient way.
Conclusions on main DevOps principles and mistakes
As you can see, DevOps implementation is quite a feat to accomplish. It takes time and effort, deep technological background and some guidance from skilled DevOps engineers to adjust the mindset and begin to see the common patterns in DevOps workflows. However, the whole impact on the business performance is incredible, as it boosts the team productivity, increases the customer satisfaction and reduces the IT operations costs. Are you ready to implement Devops principles and avoid the mistakes?