Top 9 Debunked DevOps Myths

DevOps is one of the most popular software technologies today, but a lot of people are still unclear about what it is and how they can use it. 

What Is DevOps?

The term DevOps is a combination of two words; development and operations. It is a business software development method used to combine the development team (Dev) of the organization with the operation team (Ops). It helps to integrate and automate the testing process and to deploy the repositories. Besides, it also offers transparency. Further, it gives agility in development and operations.

Let’s now read about the major purposes of this software in the business enterprise.

The Purpose of DevOps

Organizations use DevOps for various reasons. Some of the main reasons why they use this software include:

• Faster time to market (TTM).
• Reduction lead time between various fixes.
• Improvement in the frequency of deployment.
• Faster recovery time.
• Lower rate of failure of new releases.

Now, let's take a look at the various DevOps associated myths believed by most people.

DevOps Myths

Leaders across many business sectors know that increasing marketing speed is a survival skill rather than an aim. Executives, especially in the IT industry, feel the pressure to execute processes at a faster speed and more effectively, along with making better business decisions. Although most organizations have deployed DevOps successfully to accomplish the necessary goals and purpose, there are still a few misconceptions about this software.

DevOps Is a Set of Automation Tools

DevOps is not a set of automated tools that you can purchase. It is a different thinking method with respect to how you can deploy and monitor your applications. Collaboration, along with continuous delivery, continuous testing, and continuous integration are not implementation tools. Instead, they are practices that you need to adopt in your projects. Although it is true that there are various tools like JIRA, Git Hub, and Docker, which generally assist in the implementation of DevOps practices, they are only effective if you along with your team members know how to optimize and involve them in your approach.

Procedures Change With Every Project

The concept of reinventing the program for every new project defies the idea of implementing DevOps. Having a single process set that can easily be modified as per the needs and applied to various projects makes room for predictability. In this method, every person is familiar with their job role and how they need to operate the process. 

DevOps practices need to be adaptive and flexible in nature in order to implement them into server configurations, testing anomalies, deployment cycles, and the development teams’ strength. This is only possible when you and your team understand the entire process thoroughly, which can be achieved from repetition.

It Is Only for Small Developing Software Companies and Startups

Leading organizations, including Netflix, NASA, Amazon, Google, Starbucks, LinkedIn, GE, Target, Airbnb, HubSpot, Nike, etc., practice DevOps. It is developed for and used by everyone irrespective of their industry and the size of the company. Every business enterprise wants to make required improvements in its cycle time or time to market. DevOps helps organizations to improve the time to market on a regular basis and by a huge margin. This is why most companies implement this software. The CEO of Intellipaat, an e-learning institute, says that his DevOps certification programs are seeing employees from small to large-sized companies as well.

It Is a Replacement for Agile

Unlike most beliefs, DevOps is not replacing Agile. You can consider it as a continuation of Agile or an Agility enabler. With the help of DevOps, you can achieve Continuous Deployment (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery for Continuous Delivery Pipeline. Besides, it allows you to calculate the potentially shippable code towards the end of every iteration. So, DevOps and Agile work with each other in order to provide the best result and experience.

It Is an Elimination of IT Operations

As per the no operations (NoOps) concept, the IT sector will become so automated that it will not require any in-house team to manage the software. Also, people believe that microservices can make DevOps operations obsolete. However, no matter how automated the services may become, there will always be a need for operations. Although there may be a few changes in the working of these operations, they will still hold significance in DevOps.

It Is Only Developed for Open-Source Software

Generally, DevOps is implemented in organizations that use the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack along with various open-source tools such as Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Git, Chef, ELK, Nexus, Sonar, Pupper, Nagios, and Gerrit. However, obtaining a successful DevOps result is not dependent on the technology you use. A lot of organizations use COBOL, Microsoft .NET, mainframe assembly code, SAP, and also embedded systems.

It Is Incompatible With ITIL

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It consists of detailed practices for IT Service Management (ITSM) that aims to align various IT services with the respective business requirements. DevOps is compatible with ITIL, but various ITIL processes are completely automated to support high deployment frequencies and short lead times associated with DevOps. This solves many issues related to the process of configuration and release management. 

It Is the Same as Continuous Delivery

Although continuous delivery of software is an indication that the business enterprise has implemented the significant components of DevOps, it is not a binary relationship. These two services are not tied to one another, and they are definitely not the same. 

The main focus of DevOps should be to improve the work culture and maintain the infrastructure and software. Moreover, it must also support the sales and marketing department. 

It Does Not Operate Without Cloud

Most people refer to DevOps as the cloud. The cloud offers dynamic infrastructure resources for both testers and developers to get testing environments rapidly rather than waiting to fulfill a manual request. Yet, it does not mean that you need the cloud for DevOps. If your company has efficient processes to get resources that can deploy and test changes in an application, then you can adopt this software.