The 5 Common Mistakes Your Devops Team is Making

Source – whitesourcesoftware.com

DevOps has become an important and inseparable part of every business today. The rise of DevOps has meshed the development and operations teams together, largely contributing to the faster development and deployment of software.

Despite the most obvious problems that DevOps solves, there are a few common mistakes that DevOps teams and their organizations continuously commit while working together to deliver the companies’ products.

We have chosen to highlight the 5 most common mistakes your DevOps team is most likely to make.

Quickness Over Quality

In an attempt to meet the urgent need to develop software in accordance with the business needs, some organizations ignore the inexperience or lack of complete knowledge of DevOps and employ IT personnel who struggle to deliver effective DevOps outcomes. This can result in lower quality work making it out the door, as well as frustration and difficulty keeping up with competitors.

Another issue at hand when you put quality second is the concern over upcoming deadlines. DevOps professionals are often in a mad pursuit of getting the job done to meet their tight schedule. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to insufficient testing, which can result in security issues and bugs in the later stages of production.

Staying in the Experimental Stage

Organizations which are new to DevOps need to remember that you have to crawl before you can run.  Most DevOps experts advise starting small when adopting DevOps, and organizations appear to be following that advice.

However, starting small might be the right call when just starting out but that doesn’t mean you should stay small moving forward. When companies aren’t deploying at a high frequency this can cause more issues from not having the right processes in place for optimized activities. Some companies might experience higher costs, slower growth, longer development times and lower customer satisfaction than they would be if they had utilized DevOps more frequently.

Moving with the Old and the New

Some organizations tend to hold on to old practices and personnel while incorporating DevOps. This is known as a ‘Hybrid DevOps’ model. In this model, some parts of the processes are streamlined whereas the other parts are allowed to continue at their earlier pace.

While the decision to adopt a hybrid model is often made considering the organization’s existing capital and resources, this move may backfire as the newer way of  working cannot always coexist with age-old practices, leading to disruptions and frustrations.

No Monitoring Required

It would not be wise of organizations to believe that the role of DevOps engineers or the operations personnel ends with the release of the application or software. Fact is that they need to keep their head in the game or risk losing ground.

DevOps processes and tools need constant monitoring and overseeing. Your DevOps team has to constantly ensure the availability of budgets, additional goals, resources, and the continuous functioning of the software. A well-thought-through DevOps implementation plan never quits learning at any stage and neither does it stop improving moving forward.

What About Sec in DevOps

In the race to keep up, security is often the first casualty of the move to DevOps. However, thanks to automated solutions like Software Composition Analysis which organizations can use to set and enforce policies that can block open source components with known vulnerabilities from entering the product, security does not have to be left by the wayside in the name of speed and efficiency.

DevOps thrives on the concept of “shifting left” as much as possible in order to achieve a better outcome. By adding security to the mix with automated solutions, DevOps teams can focus on getting their product out the door, knowing that they are coding securely and minimizing the amount of time that would otherwise be spent remediating issues before release.

DevOps is a smart practice that is a result of the two of the core teams of every business. If applied correctly,it can give a company the edge against the competition, coming out with faster releases which are secure and reliable. Learn from the mistakes of others and do DevOps right, letting your team focus on building something incredible.