Busting 5 Common DevOps Myths

Byte 1: Busting Popular DevOps Myths 

Myth 1: DevOps is the same as CI/CD

Or to say it differently, "If I do CI/CD I do DevOps".

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about DevOps, and unfortunately there are a lot of people thinking that DevOps is the same thing as CI/CD.

The truth is that while continuous integration and delivery are some key components, DevOps adoption focuses also on the culture and responsibility in a team. It emphasizes the need for everyone on the team to take part in each other’s tasks. This improves collaboration and communication in the team.

On the other hand, CI/CD enables this culture with software and tools that emphasize automation. You can see them as a mean to an end.

Myth 2: I use Azure DevOps, Jenkins , So my team does DevOps

Conversations about DevOps are often very focused around which tools a company is using. They then turn into philosophical battles about what are the best tools. Instead, we should be communicating about the bigger picture, the business value DevOps brings to your company.

DevOps means focusing on culture, mindset, and how individuals work together. Tools are important, but only after addressing people and processes. In fact, you should be choosing the right tools for your processes, and not changing your processes to adapt them to the tools.

In general, many studies have in fact shown that the main factors in successfully implementing DevOps are the right culture, the right processes, AND the right tools. Tools should always come last.

Myth 3: I can create a DevOps team and I'm done implementing DevOps

Back to the myth, what I see happening all the time, especially in organization, is that they create a new team, they hire a bunch of DevOps engineers, they call it "DevOps team" and they think their done.

The problem there is that if you're not willing to change your processes and your culture, creating a DevOps team won't help at all. DevOps is about collaboration, every person and team in the organization should "do DevOps". Barriers and silos need to be removed for this to work. Otherwise, you are just creating more silos...

There is an exception to this, and it is when the newly created DevOps team is in fact in charge to spread the DevOps principles throughout the organization. Basically, a DevOps Center of Excellence. But this anyway is not the end, it is just the starting point.

Myth 4: If I do DevOps, I don't need IT Operations anymore

If you think about it, you already know the answer. Of course you still need to perform tasks usually associated to IT Operations! And the Operations team still has its own place.

But with DevOps the responsibilities shift. In a "properly adopted" DevOps model, Software Engineers should also take care of the deployment. Maybe they are not the ones "pressing the deploy button", but they are the ones who should understand how the application is operated in production, and the ones who have to create deployment procedures and scripts. Who better than them would know how to do it?

Also, in many DevOps-mature organizations, Developers and Software engineers share the on-call duties with Operations for solving live site incidents.

In this scenario, IT Operations duties shift more towards the care and maintenance of the live site: things like scaling, optimizations, etc.

Myth 5: I am a developer, I don’t do DevOps

A developer should know DevOps culture at its core. DevOps make developer responsible for all the things in SDLC. As the popular saying goes “YOU BUILD IT, YOU RUN IT”. Being a developer, you are not doing devOps in your team unless you are not taking responsibility of running the code in Production.