The Illusion of DevOps Adoption

By Calum Price, Senior Consultant (DevOps) at TDS

In recent years, DevOps adoption has become a badge of honour for many companies. CI/CD pipelines are in place, infrastructure is automated and companies are adding the latest and greatest tools to their stack.

On the surface, it looks like DevOps has been embraced. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll see that real DevOps adoption is about more than just a Kubernetes cluster or a fancy dashboard. To deliver lasting impact, you need full adoption, which demands cultural change, cross-team collaboration and a shared drive to add business value.

The hidden gaps in DevOps adoption

Over the last three years, the use of Cloud/DevOps technologies by organisations has grown by 87%. At face value that’s great for the industry, a true charge towards adoption. But are the correct practices being used?

Technical teams may implement Jenkins pipelines and Kubernetes clusters while using Terraform and assume they are achieving their DevOps goals. Without changing how people collaborate, measure success and deliver value, however, these tools are often just automating a broken process.

In day-to-day practice, teams remain siloed, code is thrown over the wall to operations, testing is not integrated and deployments continue to be incredibly stressful events.

In a previous job, I had the unfortunate experience of seeing a failure to properly adopt DevOps methodologies come back to haunt an entire department. The client had been handing over services built with Terraform, following best practices and deployed through a seamless CI/CD pipeline. However, a lack of AWS account controls allowed developers to make unrestricted changes in and around those services.

Eventually, we faced a critical security incident and had to rebuild everything from the Terraform state files. But when the services were redeployed, nothing worked for the developers as it had before. Years of manual, undocumented changes had been made and the result was lost time, wasted money and a process that proved to be fundamentally broken.

The reality: what DevOps really means

So, driving lasting success means a team-wide understanding that DevOps is about more than just the technology. Correct implementation of DevOps needs to consist of four key pillars:

Culture of collaboration

For DevOps to work properly, developers, operations, IT security and company stakeholders must work together with shared goals and shared accountability. We should know who, what and why.

Measured application of process

This will help ensure improvement is continuous and visible, with teams tracking meaningful metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes and mean time to recovery. Documentation is key, particularly in tracking what we do, how we do it and why we are doing it, so that any work can be picked up or handed over to another team member once ready.

Automation with purpose

Reducing manual intervention on repetitive tasks is great, but automation is only valuable when we know what it is adding to the business outcome. Don’t spend developer time and company money on repetitive tasks. Find the most labour-intensive, invest in automating them and reap the returns for the rest of time.  

Continuous feedback

This provides real-time insights from systems, enabling teams to learn, adapt and improve. Continuous feedback goes hand-in-hand with an open and collaborative culture. Regular monitoring of applications and code reviews allows for improvement to become the norm.

How your business could benefit

When a holistic, collaborative approach to DevOps implementation and culture is properly implemented, every process, tool, and automation is directly tied to business outcomes, ensuring you gain measurable value from your IT spend.

By improving collaboration and streamlining processes, we help accelerate delivery of new products and features. This means making your business more agile, getting innovations into customers’ hands faster and driving a competitive advantage.

Through automation of manual tasks, you can enjoy efficient resource utilisation and reduced costs, freeing your teams focus on higher-value growth-focused work. This reward is two-fold; automation will also support faster detection and recovery from issues, meaning maximum uptime. If you want to increase customer trust while protecting your revenue and reputation, look no further.

My final thoughts

DevOps is not about installing a set of tools. It’s neither box-checking exercise that’ll magically deliver business savings. It is an ongoing journey that reshapes how today’s organisations need to operate.

Many companies fall into the trap of believing they have “done DevOps” because they use containers, CI/CD and write Terraform. But as we’ve seen, without cultural change, shared accountability, proper processes and collaboration, these practices only create the illusion of progress.

Choose Test Driven Solutions as your tech consultancy partner to help deliver real change that drives a competitive advantage.