Many organizations mistakenly believe that establishing a dedicated DevOps team will resolve all of their infrastructure issues. Yes, companies aiming for true DevOps adoption can benefit from faster delivery, automation in testing, increased efficiency, and enhanced collaboration, but this path requires a comprehensive approach, with no shortcuts.

Understanding DevOps and its evolution

DevOps is a collaborative approach where development and operations teams work together to release software more quickly and efficiently. Now, platform engineering and site reliability engineering (SRE) are two key practices for improving both software development and operational efficiency. 

Platform engineering focuses on creating self-service infrastructure platforms that give developers easy access to the tools, environments, and resources needed to efficiently build, test, and deploy software. By automating tasks like provisioning, monitoring, and scaling, platform engineering simplifies infrastructure management. This developer-friendly approach reduces obstacles, streamlines workflows, and allows teams to focus on building features, rather than managing infrastructure.

On the other hand, SRE centers on ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of systems through automation, continuous monitoring, and effective incident management. It balances fast development with system stability by anticipating potential issues and designing solutions that maintain system reliability, even under heavy demand. Additionally, SRE teams handle incident response, ensuring quick detection, troubleshooting, and recovery, often using automation to minimize manual intervention.

Both platform engineering and SRE play critical roles in addressing operational challenges and minimizing downtime, making them essential for organizations scaling their DevOps practices.

Common DevOps antipatterns and solutions

However, as DevOps gained popularity, many organizations rushed to adopt it, leading to some imperfect implementations. Common issues include an overemphasis on tools, prioritizing speed at the expense of quality, and unintentionally creating new silos within DevOps teams, where specialized sub-teams focus on specific, fragmented functions.

Here are other common examples of counterproductive DevOps practices and how silos can form:

Merging development and operations teams: Simply merging development and operations teams and calling it a DevOps team isn’t enough. True DevOps requires a cultural shift from isolated, siloed teams, to one that cultivates shared ownership. By embracing flexibility, iterative development, and responsiveness to change, teams can own their projects, experiment, and innovate.

Removing engineering operations entirely: As engineering roles evolve, some mistakenly think streamlining workflows means getting rid of the operations team. However, expecting developers to handle everything, like infrastructure, testing, maintenance, and monitoring is unrealistic. This overload can hurt productivity, leading to a “one step forward, two steps back” situation.

The need for a dedicated DevOps team: Creating a dedicated DevOps team and treating DevOps as a standalone department often leads to confusion and mismatched expectations among team members. A dedicated DevOps team can become highly task-focused, mitigating issues at each step of the development lifecycle and then moving on to the next task. Similar to a waterfall approach, this method contradicts the collaborative culture vital for a high-functioning engineering environment.

Too much focus on tools: Organizations often focus too much on tools, emphasizing their features over how they integrate into the overall workflow and product strategy. While advanced tools and experts can be valuable, they can also cause fragmented DevOps pipelines and siloed processes if not managed well. This tool-centric approach can lead to inefficiencies and block collaboration and innovation, as tools might create obstacles rather than enable smooth workflows.

Starting too early

Many of these challenges arise when organizations try to adopt practices from larger companies before they are ready, leading to common DevOps antipatterns. Addressing these issues requires a strategic approach, starting with collaboration between platform engineering and SRE teams.

Platform engineering provides a scalable foundation for applications and services, allowing development teams to focus on business value rather than infrastructure management. By building an internal developer platform (IDP), platform engineering further simplifies the development process and reduces cognitive load. 

In contrast, SRE focuses on automating operational tasks to manage production systems effectively. SRE teams act as first responders during incidents, ensuring system reliability by proactively testing automated operations. Their goal is to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more valuable project work. SRE plays a vital role in creating robust software systems capable of handling large-scale operations, balancing the need for new features with maintaining system reliability.

Adopting a DevOps culture can arguably introduce additional layers of complexity, time investments, training, and integrating new technologies. Moreover, managing multiple systems can lead to tool overload, resulting in inefficiencies and potential overwhelm from tool sprawl if not handled properly.

Ultimately, integrating platform engineering and SRE helps eliminate the rigid segregation of responsibilities that often leads to friction and silos within teams. 

Rest easy with observability and monitoring 

Observability and monitoring are foundational to the stability, performance, and scalability of systems. However, many organizations think they’re doing observability when they’re actually just monitoring. While monitoring alerts site reliability engineers to issues, observability helps them understand why those issues are happening.

Correctly classifying incidents from P-0 to P-5 can save costs and improve resource management. The key elements of observability (logs, traces, and metrics) are vital for accurately classifying incidents and making the most of resources.

Incidents will always occur in unexpected ways, sometimes affecting just a small part of the system and other times impacting it on a much larger scale. This emphasizes the importance of having engineers on call, despite the associated costs.

Never compromise on this function, as site reliability engineers play a vital role in managing and addressing incidents. Using logs, traces, and metrics helps prevent unnecessary incident escalations during false positives that might otherwise summon the CTO.

Minimizing operational fatigue

The high stakes of service reliability and the risk of outages can put a lot of pressure on on-call engineers, which can impact their well-being, leading to mistakes that could threaten your services’ availability.

You’ll want your site reliability engineers to invest 50% of their time in project work, with the remaining half split between operational tasks and being on-call. Balancing quality with on-call responsibilities involves engineers managing incidents and then conducting retrospectives.

The key to successful DevOps

To fully embrace the DevOps model, it’s crucial to understand where team responsibilities overlap and when it’s beneficial to separate platform engineering and site reliability engineering functions from DevOps.

When hiring for platform engineering and site reliability engineer roles in a DevOps setup, look for engineers with strong tech skills, good collaboration abilities, and a curious mindset. Cross-functional training is crucial for helping team members understand each other’s roles and challenges.

These practices build empathy and enhance collaboration, which is crucial for effective DevOps adoption and adaptability to changing needs.

Final reflections

Mastering DevOps is still a tough nut to crack for many organizations. As a senior leader, you’ll sleep better at night knowing that solid DevOps practices are in place and your team has the right mindset and tools to be effective. 

For developers, a strong DevOps foundation not only improves morale but also makes the entire development process more transparent. It leads to real benefits in production, like lower costs and better reliability, with fewer out-of-hours pages – an outcome we can all root for.

To find out more information about any aspect of effective DevOps adoption, contact YLD.