How shouldn't you do DevOps?


1.4k views12 Comments

Sr. Director of Engineering in Software, 51 - 200 employees
Devops can be challenging operationally and financially, it lacks standardisation, skilled persons and lack of automation. The deployment becomes complex with more apps and releases coming over time and can be challenging if the persons lack skills, there's no automated deployments/failover mechanisms are in place. 
Chief Technology Officer in Healthcare and Biotech, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
How *shouldn't* you do DevOps? Ok!

1. Use a GUI and point-and-click your way through thousands of server installations, hoping you set the right things each time. Don't script it!

2. Save files and scripts all over the place, and if you want to make a change just edit it somewhere and have mismatched versions all over the place. Don't use version control systems.

3. Think of a server as a pet. Keep it alive, keep it running, keep patching it. If something goes wrong spend hours and hours to figure it out. Don't treat all your servers like cattle, spinning up and tearing down and rebuilding via automation as needed.

4. Leave resources running 24/7 that you don't need. Don't worry about consuming cloud costs.

5. Don't work with your colleagues on how you can continually, incrementally be doing things better and smarter with automation and documentation. Do whatever you want, whenever you want, no matter if you remember it later.

Is that what you were after?
1
CTO in Healthcare and Biotech, 2 - 10 employees
As a band aide to overcome problems. Have a well thought out schedule for the number of users for each piece and design your architecture to meet those needs while minimizing complexity and technical debt. 
Technical Product Manager in Software, 2 - 10 employees
DevOps fails when engineering teams underestimate the effort to maintain a prod environment that is representative of production workloads 

Yes there are day0 deployments but these early deployments often do not catch issues at scale 

Senior Director in Healthcare and Biotech, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
Do not bring in tools without the process fully laid out, and each team member knowing their role within the process. Do not toss DevOps out there without full immersion and training for the team. Set up intentional communication channels and points for the team to ensure discussion occurs.
Chair and Professor, Startup CTO in Education, 5,001 - 10,000 employees
I think it will be difficult if there is not sufficient financial and resource support if it is brought into the process. 
Vice President of Software Development in Finance (non-banking), 1,001 - 5,000 employees
DevOps is a culture centered around collaboration and ownership to drive some of the efficiencies in doing things the way is done. While this might cause discomfort to some of the folks in the team to do things they have not been doing. But this discomfort drives the innovation and empathy t the customers. 
This might look expensive to start with, but will be super productive and economical as the teams cruise along. This is a huge cultural shift and would take good time to settle down and be productive.
Director of Engineering in Services (non-Government), 2 - 10 employees
Some of the worst DevOps enablements I have seen were nothing more than "lipstick on a pig". E.g. no fundamental change in operations, but simply a renaming of roles and the removal of steps in a legacy staging process without making the upstream changes in the development process that delivery the acceleration benefits of tearing down walls.

This usually goes hand-in-hand with the sacking of testing, quality assurance, change management and infrastructure specialists.

But the worst thing I have seen organisations do is outsourcing the Dev and Ops part. Some organisations outsource the Dev and keeps the Ops. Or, conversely, outsource the Ops to a cloud service provider and keep the Dev. OR outsource both to different providers.

I've yet to see that strategy deliver successful outcomes to the consumers of these outsourced relationship; although the financial controllers are generally happy with the cost savings such arrangements achieve.

In summary: DevOps and outsourcing (seldom) go hand-in-hand - certainly not as a first step in transitioning from a legacy environment to a more modern one.
CTO in Education, 51 - 200 employees
Don't allow dev ops to be siloed. Ensure knowledge is shared and is part of your projects rather than an afterthought. Too many times I'll see product teams focus solely on functional requirements and ignore all the issues of scale, performance, security etc in favour of their narrow view of the UI. If dev ops are not included in the process then you'll be constantly putting out fires because there is no plan.
1
CEO in Services (non-Government), Self-employed
You shouldn't do devOps without a well thought out strategy that includes support of corporate strategy for sustainability, digital transformation or I40.

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