DevOps: Bad Practices

The title may sound little weird, as people think DevOps will solve all their problems, take away their technical debt and take them close to business nirvana!! Then what are these DevOps, bad practices? Many teams and IT services companies are eager to get on DevOps journey in whatever little way as possible with whatever little budget they may have. I hear some customers asking: Can we do DevOps in 100 hours? Can we do DevOps for onshore? My offshore is not doing DevOps? Some teams install Jenkins and run some builds integrating Git and Ant/Maven and do a build and write to Nexus/Artifactory then claim they are doing DevOps. Fun part, many teams in the organization might do this exercise and each claim they have DevOps. They created a bigger mess!!

DevOps is a top down and leadership driven initiative and depending on size of the IT ( apps, infra) might take months to years. DevOps framework and processes and tools and culture need to be set up across the enterprise. There could be 10's of internal teams and there could be ten's of vendors working for the enterprise all work within the framework and follow the same processes. During the initial POC phase you set up your Infra layer ( IaaS) and you set up your (PaaS) layer only once and build a pipeline for couple of apps and show it works and let other apps be brought on to the platform over a period of time with various internal/vendor teams. Setting up tools ( Jenkins etc.. ) takes only couple of hours at the most but building pipeline for each application/micro-service requires lot of leg work ( test automation, environment provisioning, release automation etc..) so we can say we have a end-end pipeline/push button deployment using devOps. Once you can say you can implement Continuous Deployment using zero touch or one touch deployment you can claim you have DevOps ready team/enterprise. Everything else you can say you have setup a DevOps lab and ready to experiment.