The need for a delivery model changes from company to company and requirement to requirement. While some will be preferring DevOps, others will want to take the next step in DevOps.
When we talk about DevOps, it’s not ending. The reason is that it’s a process and not a destination, it can upgrade, evolve and integrate to advanced levels, but it cannot die.
Even now, when we are discussing the end of DevOps, 80% of the enterprise companies are in the process of adopting DevOps.
Yes, DevOps is evolving to NoOps. But it’s only a new beginning that we can leverage together with DevOps to innovate on a whole new level.
The DevOps engineers and professionals might be concerned about their future due to this new update, but here’s the thing- NoOps isn’t going to end the career for ops professionals, though their role might evolve with the changing IT environment, which is not going to happen anytime soon.
Before we hop on to talk about the impact and role of NoOps, let’s get a quick understanding of the basic terms-
What is DevOps?
DevOps is one of the methodologies that IT/Software companies use to progress through the software development lifecycle, i.e., from designing to deployment.
Coming to the next part — What it is?
It’s the abbreviation of two important analogies, i.e., ‘Dev’ for Development and ‘Ops’ for Operations. That said, it’s an operating model where developers and operations teams coordinate and collaborate together to ensure seamless process flow and infrastructure management for easy deployments.
What is NoOps?
You guessed right, ‘NoOps’ means ‘No Operations’ which means the developer would no longer need to collaborate with the operation team and can work independently.
Although, there will still be ‘operations’, it will not be blended with the development team.
NoOps is based on the concept of minimal manual management to reduce friction among teams.
It automates and abstracts the IT environment from the underlying infrastructure to such levels that would eliminate the need for a dedicated operation team.
It greatly speeds up things for the software developers, as they would not have to cross-function with infrastructure at every phase anymore to do things.
Simply said, NoOps is the upgraded version of DevOps which automates the deployment, management and monitoring of projects.
Why this transition from DevOps to NoOps?
As automation is taking over, it’s not shocking to hear about this transition. In fact, it was inevitable.
In the times of Cloud and increased mobility, seamless delivery is the least of worries as the scenario now focuses upon quality, user experience, and scalability.
While the current scenario of digital transformation demands automation and the reduction of manual processes, companies are constantly looking for better alternatives to grow faster and deliver productive results.
The DevOps approach focuses upon collaboration and communication between the development and operation teams to move things to production, but when your prime goal is speed and efficiency, there is just no time for long and discussion and collaboration.
When it comes to highly talented developers, they are quickly working to speed up things but guess what, they also need to confer with the ops team to discuss whether things are going in the right direction, it causes frustration and acts as a roadblock to slow them down.
That’s where comes NoOps — an effective approach that is a perfect solution to gain momentum and move with changing technology and client requirements.
Technically, NoOps is the next step in the evolution of DevOps and not a completely separate delivery model.
Pros and Cons of NoOps-
NoOps seems to be an idealistic model to follow, but as you know, nothing is perfect, it also has its share of benefits and drawbacks. Let’s have a look- 👇
Pros-
- Smooth, effective, secure and faster deployments of applications and services at minimal management cost.
- Better and efficient scaling of infrastructure with managed services.
- Enhanced resilience and agility of organization to adapt with rapidly changing requirements.
- The freed skilled team members can be used for higher-value and critical activities.
- Better flexibility of organizations in terms of resources as they could hire dynamically skilled minds to meet an array of requirements rather than specialists who are limited to specific areas only.
Cons-
Obviously, the idea of cloudifying and automating the DevOps entirely seems very intriguing, but there are certain unclear cons that must be accounted and addressed.
As David Linthicum says in his article, “DevOps is not just about the automation of ops, it’s about people working together to continuously improve software development and operations.”
Furthermore, he says, ‘while the tools are indeed there to automate operations, the idea that you can remove people from this equation completely is pretty absurd, at least in the next five years.’
That said, now let’s see some common cons of NoOps -
- Automating the entire operational infrastructure means companies will be outsourcing their ops department to an external service provider or transferring it to a self-service model. Such automated systems can’t be left on their own, as they are quite prone to errors.
- When it comes to impenetrable security, the complete automation (without human intervention) can cause massive flaws, which is a lot to trust with, and it eventually leads to the requirement of skilled experts.
- Critical processes like testing, network, and configuration need human experts to intervene for greater outcomes.
- And of course, the reduction in the needs of operation professionals will eventually lead to the elimination of such skills from the IT landscape.
Though companies can integrate NoOps within DevOps to compliment the DevOps methodologies and enable automation in the development lifecycle, relying completely on it may not be a wise strategy.
Conclusion
The idea behind ‘NoOps’ is pretty new and advanced and will take years to get to the forefront of the Software industry if it does.
In addition, NoOps is not a fit-all approach that can benefit every enterprise but is limited to applications working in PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) environment.
DevOps is the spirit of people and processes learning, improving and growing forever, it cannot die, but we can definitely expect some automation in it due to integration with NoOps.