Top 6 DevOps Myths Debunked in 2022 For Your Business

Synchronizing your efforts is essential to business success. It improves cohesiveness and collaboration within organizations for enhanced business efficiency. DevOps is a merger of two words- Development and Operations. It enhances the collaboration between development and operation teams for enhanced productivity, which is why 77% of organizations currently rely on DevOps for software deployments. However, many DevOps myths make it a puzzle for organizations.

These myths are primarily misconceptions about  DevOps being a silver bullet to counter operational and development bottlenecks.

Here are some of the top DevOps myths and debunk them with a practical approach.

1. A tool called DevOps

If you are new to DevOps and wondering if it’s a tool to improve your software development and deployment efficiency, the confusion is valid.

DevOps is a set of practices or methodologies that help in improving efficiency across the software development lifecycle. So, DevOps is not a tool but a concept that enables higher efficiency. Here is a list of tools that can help you implement and optimize DevOps strategies,

• Gitea
• Hubot
• Podman
• Leapp
• Insomnia

2. DevOps means 100% success

The next big DevOps myth is that you can never fail once you adopt it. Of course, failures are essential, but companies that choose DevOps consider themselves to be error-proof. However, they need to understand the concept of fail-fast! Business agility is an essential factor in the fast-paced market where customer behavior changes constantly. DevOps help improves business agility, but it’s not a sure-shot solution to success.

For instance, Capital One was the first US bank to move its legacy on-premise data centers to the public cloud in 2020. The need for a quick response to customer feedback and inclination toward mobile technology encouraged Capital one to,

• Adopt agile practices
• Build automated test cases
• Automate deployments
• Migrate to the public cloud

Adopting agile practices and automation also needed Capital One teams to have faster iterations. That’s where DevOps became the ideal choice. Its adoption was a need for rapid deployment cycles.

However, DevOps integration into the existing organizational structure and scaling it to enterprise-level adoption is complex. Furthermore, it does not ensure that there are no failures. Furthermore, predicting failure modes in advance is never easy due to request patterns, volatile data scenarios, etc.

Capital One decided to develop its own version of “Chaos Engineering.” First, the teams introduced a Cloud Detour tool that helped them with failure-as-a-service. The whole idea was to leverage the fail-fast to learn the early concept. So, they successfully identified and rectified the source of errors through chaos engineering.

3. CI/CD is the same as DevOps

Since 2009, when Patrick Debois first coined the term “DevOps,” there has been a buzz around its continuous characteristics and resemblance with CI/CD. However, both are different in their core attributes.

DevOps enables organizations to achieve continuous software development. On the other hand, CI/CD is a set of practices that allows organizations to constantly build, test and deploy apps with reliable code changes.

So, how are both different?

DevOps is a macro approach, while CI/CD takes a granular approach. With a merger of development and operational roles, DevOps helps in improving the software production lifecycle. At the same time, CI/CD puts all the code changes in a repository and runs test automation to provide higher product quality at increased speeds.

4. Build a DevOps team

DevOps teams contribute to a cultural shift in organizations, but that is not enough. Many organizations hire DevOps engineers and form a team. However, building such a team is not enough, you need to embrace DevOps at an organizational level.

Everything from processes to production workflows and testing needs to integrate with the DevOps culture. Your DevOps team can help you reap the benefits through the authority to implement it enterprise-wide.

5. Automation means speed

There is no denying that automation does improve speed due to a significant reduction in repetitive tasks. However, organizations believe that automation will improve their productivity and speed drastically. This is a misconception because each process has several internal and external factors.

So, if you adopt the DevOps culture and automate processes, these factors need to be considered. For example, an application may have many different third-party services integrated through APIs. You may automate specific tasks with DevOps, but it may not yield results without considering the API behavior. So, if you are introducing test automation, you need to build specific test cases and simulations for external API behaviors.

6. One-size-fits-all solutions

DevOps is excellent to improve software development and deployments, but it’s never the same for all organizations. What works for Facebook, Google or Amazon may not work for you. Every business has different needs, and that is why you need to analyze your systems and then decide whether to go for DevOps or not.

Here are some tips for analyzing your system to determine DevOps requirements,

• The operations team needs to analyze all the deployed environments, resources, and third-party integrations to check for inefficiencies.
• Development teams need to analyze the need for application improvements of benefits that DevOps can bring.
• Finance teams need to observe the infrastructure costs and determine the impact of DevOps adoption.
• Customer success teams can take user feedback and understand the need for DevOps to improve experiences.

Conclusion

Debunking DevOps myths is essential to clarify its adoption. Without clarity, you may end up embracing DevOps culture without desired results. It’s time to act. It is crucial to understand that DevOps is not a solution that yields results instantly. You need to gradually automate processes, improve workflows, and enhance collaborations through DevOps culture to see results. The key to fully leveraging DevOps is choosing the right DevOps strategy.

From the lengthy, informative, and entertaining talk that took place on social media regarding DevOps, we thought the discussion of DevOps myths was worth sharing. It’s often easier to explain what DevOps isn’t than what it is.

We have covered the potential DevOps myths and how the debunk them with the practical approach. Let us also know if you have any questions about this topic and DevOps in general.