Since the beginning of software development, organizations have been working towards the goal of increasing net profit, ROI, and cash flow. The only way they could achieve this was by developing quality products and bringing them to the market quickly and at reduced costs.
While traditional approaches like Waterfall enabled them to deliver software in a sequential manner, iterative approaches like Agile, and later DevOps, enabled them to ensure an uninterrupted flow of product deliverables to users, thus meeting the growing expectations of customers.
Since DevOps bridges the gap between operations and development teams, it enables better collaboration while allowing teams to boost productivity, software quality, and business agility. Today, companies across the world are adopting DevOps to increase throughput, reduce delivery risk, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure a quicker turnaround.
However, for many, the myths surrounding the concept restrict them from maximizing value from their DevOps investments. So, what are these myths? And what’s the actual truth behind these myths? Let’s find out!
The most common DevOps myths
DevOps lays the foundation for the convergence of people, processes, and tools to enable adaptive IT and business agility. The basic pillars of Devops (integration, communication, and collaboration) ensure that the software under development constantly meets customer requirements and is at par with market changes. When implemented correctly, DevOps offers a host of benefits: it allows teams to look at the bigger picture, focus on the flow, address operational issues in time, and constantly look for opportunities for improvement.
However, myths around DevOps often come in the way of achieving real success.
Listed below are 9 DevOps myths you need to stop believing today!
- DevOps is all about culture: Many organizations view DevOps as a cultural shift that needs to be brought about across the organization. Although culture is an integral aspect of DevOps, it is not the only one. DevOps is as much about strong processes and the right technology as it is about culture. It is an amalgamation of these three organizational pillars – namely culture, technology, and processes – that paves the way for shared goals, periodic reviews, collective decision-making, cross-functional workflows, and end-to-end traceability.
- Only technology teams can benefit from DevOps: It is true that when DevOps was first introduced, it was meant to benefit technical teams – namely software development and IT operations. However, over time, the concept has seeped across the organization – all the way through to sales, marketing, and support teams as well as to the C-suite. Today, everyone in the organization understands the importance of creating a culture of collaboration, communication, and integration apart from automation, and continuous improvement.
- DevOps is about automation: Many organizations consider DevOps to only be about automation. While it is true that automation tools allow teams to drive quicker value from their DevOps efforts, it also requires them to think about how to deploy and monitor the health of your applications over time. Tools like Jira, CircleCI, GitHub, and Puppet are not just tools that need to be implemented; they are practices that must be embraced and incorporated across the software delivery lifecycle. It is only when teams understand the concept behind these tools that they can optimize processes and develop new ways of working.
- Purchasing the best technology guarantees DevOps success: Many organizations looking to benefit from DevOps believe that investing in the best technology is all they need to do to achieve success. However, simply following a checklist of tools to implement within their team is not what enables success. Every department, every team, and every resource needs to understand the shift behind DevOps, the improvements in processes that need to be made, and the collaboration that is required to achieve the intended outcomes.
- DevOps = Continuous Delivery: It is true that Continuous Delivery is important for DevOps, but they certainly aren’t the same thing. Although it is good to focus on Continuous Delivery to constantly meet the changing needs of customers, what’s more important is to improve communication and collaboration between teams building and maintaining the software and infrastructure and supporting groups like sales and marketing. Such collaboration allows everyone in the organization to be aware of the contributions of every other, thus enabling quicker attainment of shared goals. In a nutshell, DevOps enables Continuous Delivery.
- DevOps cannot work for large, complex projects: A lot of times, organizations shy away from DevOps because they think the concept cannot work for large projects. However, this is far from the truth. In reality, complex systems are more suited for DevOps as they require far more discipline and collaboration than smaller ones. Since complex projects have multiple software or hardware components, each with unique delivery cycles and timelines, DevOps facilitates better coordination between individual delivery cycles as well as system-wide release planning.
- DevOps is a replacement for Agile: It is true that DevOps shares a lot of common principles and values with Agile, empowering highly-capable teams to work on delivering code in small chunks to enable an uninterrupted end-user experience. However, the main difference between the two is the “shift left” approach. Through continuous testing and continuous deployment, teams can focus on quality code earlier in the development lifecycle, thus fixing the bugs early and delivering new features in a timely and reliable manner.
- DevOps is a skill, and you can be certified in it: Several software developers are also of the opinion that they can acquire DevOps as a skill and get certified in it overnight. However, that’s not exactly true. Implementing DevOps across software projects requires a lot more than a “DevOps engineer” or “DevOps manager” title on a LinkedIn profile. It requires developers to have good communication skills, a sufficient understanding of different tools, technical know-how of upcoming technologies, and more. It is a shift that moves beyond individuals and interactions. It is a methodology that focuses on processes and tools that teams need to practice together – and not in silos.
- DevOps products are available in the market: Organizations that think DevOps can be purchased as a product from the market often find themselves at the receiving end of lackluster results. In reality, DevOps is not a product that can be rolled out across the business; it is a concept with certain principles and practices, the success of which depends entirely on how it is applied to the organization.
Enable change
The world of DevOps has a lot to offer to organizations big and small. The trick is to understand what the concept really means and apply it in a way that best fits the needs of the organizations.
If you really want to achieve unprecedented success with your DevOps investment, it is imperative you understand that in addition to tools and processes, DevOps is also about culture, philosophy, and the right mindset. It is about improving collaboration, sharing responsibility, continuous improvement, as well as, and waste elimination, an amalgamation of which can enable change with efficiency and effectiveness.
