DevOps vs. NoOps - is this really the end?

You might have had some advanced knowledge about a NoOps reality.

Some developers believe this could herald the end of DevOps as we know it. However, these perspectives currently fall short of the truth.

While NoOps seems like the shining path toward an efficient digital future, it does not provide a silver bullet that outright replaces DevOps capabilities.

It's critical to understand the structure and function of each approach to establish the most efficient digital infrastructure for your organisation. In many cases, the best of both worlds (DevOps and NoOp hybrid environments) might be needed to achieve optimal performance, combining tireless automation with professional collaboration.

DevOps - A Power Couple

Essentially, DevOps involves seamless collaboration between software development and IT operations. This symbiotic process unites various philosophies, practices, and tools to improve organisational productivity and significantly shorten system development life cycles. Through well-established DevOps, your company will face fewer bottlenecks and minimise conflicts between developers and operational teams through the power of agile software and continuous delivery.

DevOps has enhanced the possibilities of technologies that include cloud computing, task automation through CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) tools, and collaborative environments such as incident management and real-time monitoring. The success of DevOps eventually led to the formation of other collaborative practices, such as DevSecOps (developer security operations), which streamlines the digital side of business operations.

The Benefits of DevOps

DevOps solves the lingering communication issues between IT experts with varying specialisations. The structured method eliminates tedious manual processes and solves the problem of teams working in silos, which can lead to miscommunication and costly project delays.

DevOps enables developers to understand the common hurdles encountered by operation team members, testing codes under realistic conditions. Operational teams can quickly identify, fix, or mitigate errors by working on manageable and easily reversible software updates and changes. As a result, you can expect faster software delivery, efficient team collaborations, and improvements in product quality.

The Downside of DevOps

While DevOps has proven effective in streamlining standard IT environments, it brings potentially complex and pricey challenges for your organisation. Mainly, you'll need specialised DevOp tools and system capabilities (i.e., hardware and software) plus relevant technical training to ensure that team members can communicate effectively throughout the project life cycle.

NoOps - The new kid on the block

NoOps, a neologism coined by Mike Gualtieri from Forrester, refers to an IT method that eliminates manual operations and intervention, instead relying on automated functions. The concept of NoOps seems inevitable as infrastructure experts continue to develop cost-effective and autonomous IT solutions while resolving the complexities that may arise from DevOps arrangements.

Benefits of NoOps

A NoOps IT operation enables you to manage, deploy, and monitor software without manual human involvement. With the novel concept at work, developers can focus entirely on refining software production while operations run smoothly and consistently under predetermined automation.

The NoOps transition can help your company achieve significant cost savings by allocating all IT operations to the cloud through serverless computing. Your company can drive automated monitoring and distributions via a frictionless process with serverless IT infrastructures. You can eliminate the risks of human error commonly associated with manual intervention by tapping on the automated capabilities of NoOps.

Disadvantages of NoOps

Although NoOps eliminates the costly and tedious prerequisites of DevOps collaborations, they bring a depth of uncertainty and impracticality. For instance, NoOps might increase security concerns since you will run your IT operations in a serverless environment with limited visibility.

In addition, your company might face additional software incompatibility issues due to a lack of communication between developers and operations (since NoOps replaces them with automated processes).

Perhaps the most pressing challenge is that, despite the latest NoOps advancements, you'll still need a physical team to manage IT infrastructure, regulatory compliance, IAM (identity access management), and the costs involved in maintaining these processes. With NoOps, these responsibilities may ultimately overburden developers and prove counterproductive in the long run.

What can businesses expect in software operations of the future?

Rather than considering NoOps as a one-size-fits-all replacement for DevOps, business owners may gradually integrate some of its elements to improve their existing DevOps processes. Also, it's essential to note that NoOps may limit function to applications that fit into current PaaS (platform as a service) environments.

You might need to invest more time and capital in restructuring legacy applications to function under PaaS settings. The incompatibility problem applies particularly to organisations that manage dedicated data centres, where mass migration of files and information could lead to system issues.

On the one hand, the possibilities of NoOps were born from the advancements of DevOps. NoOps can boost the efficiency of operational teams but not take them out of the equation.

On the other hand, DevOps will continue to shape the much-needed dynamics between operation teams and developers to facilitate the continuous learning and improvement necessary for thriving in a rapid-paced digital landscape.

Rather than heralding the end of DevOps, NoOps could signal the beginning of a transformative relationship.

How NoOps empowers Rawnet?

We believe in automation wholeheartedly!

Why repeat yourself over and over again? Why should human intervention be the first point of call? Can something else not do it?

The last point may seem a little out there but in a technical and rapid digital world, we should always be thinking about streamlining to increase efficiency.

At Rawnet we have taken a shift right thinking in the following so the development team have more control:

• Our developers are the main point for code changes, having an Ops team manage this would create a bottleneck and slow down code deployments.
• Monitoring. Our developers will have detailed knowledge of the codebase compared to an Ops engineer and will be able to detect smaller issues or application issues quicker.
• Automated deployments. We use the correct PaaS to empower our developers to release code changes quickly and efficiently. You don’t want to wait hours for a critical fix to go live; it needs to be fast!
• Rollbacks. Our developers can roll back code and deployment changes with a click of a button.
• Automated recovery.

While we have put all of this in place it frees up our DevOps team to focus on the bigger picture to make positive changes to our client’s businesses. This means we are able to focus on cost-saving plans based on your data patterns, the latest services and technologies to empower their business, AI to increase NoOps productivity and a transparent, holistic shared view.

Start a conversation with the Rawnet team to discover how you can drive your DevOps and NoOps processes with leading industry tools and strategic solutions.