It has been more than 2 years, since Xi Group Ltd. ventured to provide DevOps services. We worked on multiple projects, for established companies and startups. In that period, we experienced multiple misconceptions about what DevOps actually is or what should it be. Here are the ones we find most common.

Myth: Developers can do Ops

People, lacking operational background, no matter the position or title, will fail to become DevOps Engineers. In the same way in which one can not build a house without proper foundation, becoming DevOps Engineer without operational expertise is futile. In fact, we experience the opposite to be true: Developers are generally bad at Ops. And there are complex reasons for this. Education, work experience and the separation of roles in most enterprises are mostly geared towards deep specialization. In contrast, the DevOps Engineer has to be able to fill-in for a lot of roles: sometimes system architect, sometimes build engineer, monitoring specialist or even quality assurance specialist. Hence to be a good DevOps candidate you need exposure to a lot of technologies and activities. Operation background is a must. Development background helps.

Myth: Sysadmins are obsolete

Saying that system administrator or system engineers are obsolete is like saying that Unix is obsolete. Of course it is … in its original form. But it has been evolving for more than 40 years now. And it is the same with the System Administrator role. DevOps is not revolutionary step. It is evolutional development of the role based on the changes in the environment. Adaptation is required. Culture is changing, the Cloud is mainstream technology today. In fact, many of those that were System Administrators before the DevOps movement emerged were doing ‘DevOps’ in one way or another. And those are the people you want to be on your DevOps team today. Without being disrespectful, we’d prefer forty-something-year-old Unix sysadmin that knows SH and “some TCL, Perl, Expect” to any monkey-patching, “Ruby/node.js’s the deal” developer!

Myth: DevOps can not be outsourced / off-shored

This a matter of organizational structure and culture. In the same way Operations or Development can be outsourced or off-shored, DevOps can be. Communication is key. Presence is important. But technology allows us to have it all without being physically in the same room. In our experience it boils down to company / team culture. If you have the right ingredients in the mix it will not matter where the guy that manages your 1000+ instances Hadoop cluster physically is. He may be in your conference room and if you ignore his input stuff will break. He may be hundred of miles away and if team cohesion is strong product will be deployed.

Myth: You need DevOps only if you use Cloud

Another common misconception. Although DevOps movement gained momentum with the increasing popularity of the Cloud those are not in a causal relation. You can apply most of the DevOps culture and principles without using cloud technologies. Any significantly complex system can benefit from them. The Cloud created specific challenges (elasticity!) that DevOps practices can meet, but the same or similar challenges are found in most distributed systems anyway. DevOps is first cultural, then technological.

Myth: DevOps is supplementary activity

This is common incarnation of the “we can add it later” mentality. In the industry, one will meet a lot of those. We get the “We can add it later” reply for requests about Security, Performance, Maintainability, etc. However, much like Security, if you’re committed to actually do DevOps – do it from the start. Include DevOps-aware participants in all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Treating DevOps as supplementary activity will bring only sub-optimal results, which in turn translates into increased operational or development cost.

If you are committed to implement DevOps, don’t believe any of the myths mentioned above. Define your goals and create the environment to implement them successfully! After all, DevOps is about better/faster/smarter execution …

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