Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we discuss whether NoOps is just a buzzword, a far-fetched reality, or simply the next evolutionary state of DevOps.
Businesses across the globe are adopting various means of automation to catch up with the digital transformation wave and for many, the next step is NoOps, defined as a fully automated IT environment. In an organization that follows the DevOps practice, deployment processes and infrastructure provisioning previously carried out by IT operations technicians are now mostly left to third-party on-demand service providers.
Automation that forms the core of DevOps frees up IT operators to focus on higher level functions. So what’s the difference between NoOps and DevOps, the well-established deployment practice embraced by many companies? NoOps is the point at which IT operations automation reaches a level where the development teams don’t need an Ops team anymore. The objective is to remove operations completely from the equation so businesses can solely focus on better deployment.
Choosing to adopt NoOps translates to shifting to a serverless environment. This shift isn’t just about using resources efficiently, but also about reducing associated costs and, more importantly, shifting workforce talent to development and deployment.
Let’s look at five interesting reads about how easy it is to shift to a NoOps environment and what this could mean to your organization.
1. A NoOps state of mind
When organizations start practicing NoOps, they won’t need to bother much with servers and infrastructure, but a problem arises in finding the right serverless offerings that work together. Ideally, a fully functioning NoOps platform is an integrated solution that handles everything from compute, storage, and memory to data management, search, data harmonization, semantics, and analytics; but most existing serverless solutions solve only specific problems. Going serverless could be the first step in adopting a NoOps culture.
2. DevOps Ventured, NoOps Gained: The Natural Progression of Automation Through Collaboration
Choosing to go with platform as a service (PaaS) tends to give developers freedom to worry less about issues such as operational processes, regulation, and compliance. All these processes would be preconfigured as standard operating procedures by Ops teams. Although this could increase the productivity of the organization, it comes with the downside risk of losing flexibility.
3. Serverless Computing: Moving from DevOps to NoOps
The core idea is to develop reusable code that can be automated to reduce time spent on development and testing cycles. Reusing code helps organizations gain an advantage in serveless computing and in network troubleshooting. A NoOps and reusable code strategy can dramatically improve your time and resource economies of scale.
4. NoOps a no-brainer? Completely autonomous software deployment at least a decade away
NoOps is also popularly named Low-Touch Ops and, as the name suggests, the goal is to achieve operational intelligence that accurately and automatically identifies the root cause of operational issues with minimal human effort. Organizations today often have multiple layers of functions, and attaining NoOps excellence involves bringing together intelligence, orchestration, and automation.
5. NoOps: How serverless architecture introduces a third mode of IT operations
Adopting NoOps doesn’t mean completely letting go of DevOps; rather, it’s putting the tenets of DevOps to better use. This way, organizations can slowly work on maturing their DevOps capabilities to fit this era of automation. Moreover, NoOps doesn’t mean the end of a physical Operations team altogether; these teams would still exist and put their knowledge to use on innovation rather than procedural practices.
Understanding the positive implications of NoOps makes it easy to see that adopting it only makes sense if your organization has a homogeneous IT environment with no or few infrastructural level changes. This is not realistic for many organizations, so a complete shift to NoOps might not be practical. NoOps can be only fully embraced through the gradual evolution and betterment of DevOps practices. Eventually it will be inevitable as organizations realize cost, resources, and time savings.
