Common DevOps Mistakes Businesses Make and How To Avoid Them
What Is DevOps?
Understanding what DevOps truly means is important to avoid common DevOps mistakes. DevOps is a cultural philosophy and mindset where development and operational teams leave behind the inefficiencies of siloed functioning. It is a set of practices, tools, and philosophies that improve the collaboration between development and operations teams (DevOps), empower the organization to respond the evolving market faster with a higher velocity of goods and services delivery, and improve their product quality much more efficiently than what traditional software development practices would allow. As such, DevOps is a way of life that promotes synchronization, collaboration, and efficiency at scale.
With that said, let’s get started with the blog, understanding the benefits of DevOps implementation, common DevOps mistakes, and ways to avoid them for complete organizational growth in the desired direction.
Benefits Of DevOps Adoption
“Develop systems not software” says Ben Butler Cole, the Director of Engineering at the Bennett Institute For Applied Data Science. Discussed below are the several benefits of DevOps adoption for present-day businesses:
Accelerated Development
By enhancing collaboration between development and operations teams, DevOps helps businesses innovate at higher speed and efficiency, with both teams aligned on responding to evolving customer demands as quickly and efficiently as possible.
CI/CD
DevOps automation practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery help businesses achieve rapid delivery by increasing the pace and frequency of releases, testing, and bug fixing, thereby consistently maintaining a competitive edge and first mover advantage wherever applicable.
Enhanced Collaboration
When development and operations teams (pivotal to software development and delivery in an organization) no longer function in siloes, their workflows, strengths, and responsibilities can be combined and better directed to eliminate organizational inefficiencies, save time, and improve product quality.
Security
Security in DevOps can be achieved by implementing access controls, configuration management techniques, and automating compliance measures. This will help you ensure complete credibility while you innovate at faster pace, without compromising on security.
Enhanced Application Quality
Businesses hire DevOps engineers to ensure top-notch application quality by monitoring performance in real-time, implementing CI/CD practices to ensure the reliability of each change, and maintain and enhance the overall infrastructure and application updates quality to consistently deliver smooth user experiences.
Scalability
DevOps helps you minimize risks from managing evolving systems and dealing with changes at a rapid pace, streamlining infrastructure and development processes for better testing and delivery in a reliable and repeatable manner.
What Are The Common DevOps Mistakes Businesses Make?
Successful DevOps implementation can unlock the growth potential of businesses and help them establish a system that facilitates rapid innovation and development efficiency. However, potential pitfalls can undermine the complete realization of these benefits. Discussed below are common DevOps mistakes businesses make:
Treating DevOps only as a set of tools
Many organizations tend to have a fundamentally wrong understanding of what DevOps is. As mentioned earlier, DevOps is a cultural mindset, as opposed to a single IT project or a single team’s responsibility aimed at holistic benefits such as accelerated development, development efficiency, and improved collaboration at scale. However, many organizations consider DevOps to be a set of tools or a point-by-point checklist to follow, leading to fragmented workflows, inefficient feedback loops, and compromised velocity of developing and delivering software.
Compromised Observability in DevOps
Many a times, businesses rush to deliver new features and updates to users via continuous delivery without any clear plan of action, fallback mechanism, or strategy to identify and nullify performance issues. This is a result of compromised observability in DevOps, crucial for providing consistent user experiences, efficient performance monitoring, proactive resolution of issues, and adherence to all security and compliance requirements.
Slow Deployments and Frequent Errors
One of the major DevOps challenges is slow deployments, frequent errors, and consistently delayed releases. This is a result of not implementing automation strategies wherever necessary, fragmented testing and delivery pipelines, manual errors prolonging your organization’s response to the evolving market, inefficient or ill-informed automation strategies, and compromised developer productivity.
Siloed Functioning
One of the major reasons why DevOps fails in many organizations is siloed functioning across teams, with team members focused on their respective tasks only, overlooking the importance of shared responsibility. This is a result of poor communication, vision misalignment, prioritizing individual team tasks over holistic organizational goals, and absence of the mindset of shared responsibility, signifying the absence of the DevOps success pillars. Siloed functioning often delays bug fixing, prompt identification of issues, and prolonged time to market.
Ignoring Security in DevOps
Many businesses make the mistake of considering security as an afterthought, rather than prioritizing it from the outset. Security vulnerabilities affect the application’s credibility, compromise the privacy of user data, disrupt operational workflows, and prolong deployments and deliveries because of the time teams take to resolve issues. Besides, consistent security vulnerabilities can hamper continuous innovation with teams constantly solving recurring issues, rather than focusing on new developments.
How To Avoid DevOps Mistakes?
Discussed below are ways to help you avoid common DevOps pitfalls mentioned above:
Cultural Shift
Adopting DevOps as a cultural mindset will help your organization benefit from its complete potential. For this, communicate the need for the same and encourage increased collaboration between operations and development team to ensure everyone is aligned. Instilling practices like intentional experimentation and values like continuous learning, shared responsibility also helps organizations adopt the DevOps culture fully.
Tracking Comprehensive Performance
Businesses need to ensure that all their standardizations, tools, and teams are geared for successful and complete DevOps practices, maintaining the foundation necessary for treating delivery and integration as a consolidated team. Among the major DevOps best practices are integrating monitoring tools to track real-time performance, taking a complete view of the system’s health by analysing logs from different sources, and using performance dashboards with clearly defined KPIs that improve team collaboration and efficacy.
Automation in DevOps
Implementing informed DevOps automation strategies that align with your business goals, user needs, and internal workflows can help you avoid delayed releases and help you respond to evolving customer needs on time, ahead of competition. Some DevOps automation best practices include, implementation of CI/CD pipelines to automate code testing and deployment for greater reliability, leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for managing configuration and simplifying infrastructure management, and improving overall development efficiency using self-service environments.
Businesses can avoid siloed functioning by enabling their teams to work on shared goals and understand how they can individually and collectively contribute to the DevOps implementation success. For this, joint planning sessions help teams understand their responsibilities, contribute to decision-making, and cross-training sessions help them understand how they can collaborate better for full DevOps realization.
DevSecOps
Businesses can eliminate security vulnerabilities by implementing a DevSecOps approach, where development, operations, and security teams work as an integrated whole from the outset. With DevSecOps, businesses can implement security measures across every stage of the development lifecycle, automate repeating security tasks, and inform the development lifecycle with continuous feedback. This improves the application’s credibility, reduces time to market, and builds credibility with seamless and transparent operations.
DevOps Best Practices
Mentioned below are DevOps best practices to help you implement this culture successfully and yield its complete benefits:
- Implementing continuous testing in DevOps helps businesses detect bugs proactively before they become major performance issues, establish reliable and efficient feedback loops, and guarantee accelerated development and faster delivery of quality releases.
- Building a culture and environment that encourages open collaboration, shared responsibility, intentional experimentation, and continuous learning.
- Looking at DevOps as a culture and way of life, rather than as a one-time IT project, or a list of advanced tools to be implemented, enabling the organization to understand its holistic benefits as discussed above and establish a system that future proofs software development and delivery.
- Implementing test automation in DevOps to improve bug detection efficacy and proactively identify and nullify performance issues and security vulnerabilities before they escalate into major user hindrances.
- Requiring each team to have a risk mitigation strategy alongside continuous testing and enhanced observability practices and conducting periodic reviews of how each team plans their release management.
- Embracing Agile methodologies to align DevOps with business goals, user needs, and prioritize developer productivity helps in not overloading too many changes at once and disrupting the entire workflow.
Conclusion
By understanding the common DevOps mistakes most organizations make, businesses can recognize the loopholes that prevent many from realizing the full potential of DevOps and start by rectifying each of these errors. It must be said that each of the mistakes mentioned above are foundational errors and can impact the credibility of the entire software development and delivery machinery of an organization. However, businesses should not prevent themselves from embracing a DevOps culture because of these challenges. Rather, they should understand that DevOps is a necessity for establishing reliable software development, testing, and delivery processes, which, if successfully implemented with the right solution partner, can set the organization towards the path of continued growth and success as it scales.
