In my job at AWS I have the privilege of working with many different teams, all focused to help our customers lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. It’s greatly rewarding to see these efforts recognized by our customers and by leading analysts. Last year Gartner introduced a new Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure […]
With cloud adoption on the rise, the level of abstraction in application architecture has increased — from traditional on-premises servers to containers and serverless deployments. The focus on automation has also increased to the point where manual intervention is no longer preferred, even for infrastructure-related activities like backups, security management, and patch updates. This desired state equates to a NoOps environment, which involves smaller teams that can manage your application lifecycle. Ideally, in such an environment, the efforts required by your operations team will be eliminated.
It is beyond debate that DevOps is now deeply integrated into the DNA of all cloud-first organizations and is today more of a norm than a rarity. Cloud applications demand agility, and DevOps delivers it. However, does NoOps mean the end of the DevOps era? Or is it simply the next step in the progression of DevOps?
DevOps automation is the process of getting machines to handle repetitive work in the software deployment and operations lifecycle so that operators can deploy iterative updates faster and their systems operate more reliably.
Since the term DevOps was coined in 2009, automation has moved further and further right from automating development, integration, and delivery work to today’s frontier on the operational side, where we see new tools to automate observability, reliability, and remediation.
Enterprises have been moving away from conveyor belt-style project delivery with hardware and software resource planning, ordering, and integration. Instead, they’re taking advantage of increasingly flexible cloud resources combined with DevOps. This methodology provides a way to address the question, “If we can provision resources quickly and easily, how can we complete entire projects with similar responsiveness?” The goal is to make better-quality software quicker and more easily.
With the DevOps approach, structured communication still takes place, but in an iterative, incremental fashion, much like polishing a jewel. Instead of lofty goals set in the somewhat distant future, practical solutions can be created, deployed, and adjusted. The process gets applications in the hands of end-users far sooner, smooths any rough edges using actual user feedback, and helps organizations not only become more responsive to changing needs but also make much more efficient use of valuable software development and operations resources.
