5 Reasons to NOT Move to DevOps

DevOps is all the rage. But what even is DevOps? Why should you care? Some people are saying DevOps is the best thing since Web 2.0. But is it overrated? Let's take a look at some reasons you may not want to move to DevOps.

How can you move to something when you don’t even really know what it is? Is it a management style? Is it agile? Is it a way to organize your teams? Is it a workplace culture? No one really knows. But they pretend to. Then they pretend it’s giving them some kind of benefit over the older, proven styles of managing software development teams. No thank you.

I assume Dev refers to Developers and Ops refers to Operations. Why would those two departments ever want to combine what they do? Our code ninjas are exactly that: ninjas. They get in, get the work done, and get out. They don’t need to waste time on thinking about what operating system their software is going to run on or how to automatically scale the system it runs on. It’s not their job. Collaboration sounds like time-wasting to me. 

Releasing a new version of your software every time someone adds a single feature? Are you crazy? How can you perform a new release without a change advisory board meeting every single day? We don’t have time for that! And the possibility of breaking your website a few times a day sounds ludicrous. Then we have to increase our break-fix meetings, our investigation idea showers, and our blue-sky fix-the-problem lunch-and-learns. There aren’t enough hours in the week!

All these DevOps engineers are always talking about Automation. You know who doesn’t like automation? People with jobs. How can you automate away your own job? Who will be there to fix it when it eventually breaks? Which it will, automation always breaks. How can a system perfectly automate everything all the time? Sounds like some kind of dream. 

I hear that metrics are all the rage amongst DevOps enthusiasts as well. Monitor everything. Graph everything. What am I going to do with pretty graphs? Well, I guess the CXO team might like some visuals . . . But still, they’re just line charts! What does it matter if we had 2,000 port scans hitting all of our web servers overnight? As long as port 80 is open we’re safe! Web servers still use port 80, right?

Did I need to put an /s up there? If you find yourself agreeing with these points, it might be time to take a look at how your software development practices are aligned with your operations team. You could be producing higher-quality software faster and saving a lot of time and money. The article is written in jest, but it does address key virtues of what DevOps can bring to your organization.

Want to learn more? Get a crash course in what DevOps is and how it could transform your software development practices in our shiny new (and totally free) DevOps Concepts course. No previous experience required!