What DevOps Is Not

It Is Not Dev + Ops

Taken literally, DevOps is easy to split into Dev and Ops, but DevOps is not simply development plus operations.

Traditional Dev and Ops are separated: Dev turns requirements into artifacts, Ops turns artifacts into services, and the boundary between them is sharp.

The moment something goes wrong, Ops blames a bug in Dev, and Dev blames Ops for missing alerts.

Merging the teams can break that blame cycle, but merging teams alone is not enough. Without clear goals and a working method, such a team is still hard to manage.

It Is Not a Product

DevOps is not a tool, and not a product.

Plenty of ToB products will claim that managing your R&D process with their product is practicing DevOps. Take that with a grain of salt. There is no product that, once you use it, puts you in a state of practicing DevOps.

DevOps is a valuable practice, and valuable things are never easy.

Of course DevOps needs products to support it — automation tools, orchestration tools, process management tools, project management tools, and so on.

The main role of tools and products is support; they are not decisive. Good tools raise efficiency, but tools cannot judge whether that efficiency is good or bad, and cannot guide a team.