DevOps implementation
DevOps has been one of the buzzwords in the technology world lately because it offers organizations a huge number of benefits for shortening the software development lifecycle. There is no single definition or correct answer to the question “What is DevOps”. DevOps (development and operations) is not a tool, a technology or any structure; it is more of a philosophy and concept. It is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to help shorten the system development life cycle and ensure continuous integration and delivery with high quality software. If you want to implement devops competently, you need to use devops service providers.
Why DevOps is not a panacea: Problems after implementation
However, as noted earlier, DevOps is not a silver bullet for solving all IT problems. What’s more, using this approach is capable of triggering new ones, such as:
- A temporary drop in productivity at the beginning of using new work organization methods and technical tools, as the team is just getting used to the changes. This can have a negative impact on financial results, so don’t draw global conclusions about DevOps inefficiency from the first failures.
- DevOps doesn’t work “alone” – don’t expect a total reduction in time to market by implementing it only in IT processes. If market research lasts for years, as before, accelerating software development, testing and deployment won’t help get the product to the consumer faster.
- Expanding the number of employees doing similar work and increasing the volume of work – for example, if, according to Agile principles of rapid response to customer requests, technical support constantly creates new requests, it is necessary to increase the frequency of releases. This, in turn, leads to hiring new developers, testers and maintainers, but does not always dramatically improve the bottom line.
- Higher qualification requirements for employees (DevOps-engineers), who must have an in-depth understanding of many technologies. There are few such professionals in the IT market and they are quite expensive. And the popularity of the term DevOps has led to even more hype around this concept. There is a popular joke that a system administrator with Docker knowledge differs from a DevOps-engineer with Docker knowledge not by the knowledge but by the salary: 1 devops costs like 2 admins.