In 2011, Mike Gualtieri, VP, and Principal Analyst at Forester Research, neologized the term NoOps, “I don’t want DevOps. I want NoOps”. The term NoOps became popular a few months after that. But what is NoOps, is it a replacement for DevOps?

This article discusses the need for NoOps and the shortcomings of DevOps that it solves.

Necessity is the Mother of all Inventions:

In the field of IT, this has gone beyond the building of software to how and where end users’ get access to applications.

After the rise of agile software development methodology, there were concerns that the process was messy and this caused a lot of delays in releasing new applications. To take full advantage of this new methodology and overcome the dysfunction in the industry, the concept of DevOps was introduced in 2007.

What’s the main change that DevOps brought? Before its introduction, those who wrote code were functionally separated from those who were responsible for its deployment and support. After its introduction, those development silos were broken down thereby eliminating the inefficiencies that existed.

In this article, we discuss how DevOps evolved into NoOps and the cause of this evolution. You’ll also understand what NoOps is and what it does better than DevOps.

How DevOps evolved to NoOps:

The main goal of DevOps is to shorten the software development life-cycle by providing a continuous delivery system. In its efforts to achieve shorter life cycles, it introduced some critical issues such as the lack of guarantee that teams will always be on the same page. Another shortcoming is that a failure by one team can easily lead to the whole system malfunctioning.

That’s where NoOps come in.

What is NoOps?

NoOps is a relatively new concept that champions more automation of the IT environment to replace dedicated on-premise operations teams. It basically removes the need for manual software management after it has been developed and delivered to be built.

What NoOps did to solve the challenges that DevOps presented was eliminate the dependency factor within the software lifecycle.

In NoOps, all you need to do is to develop the code and upload it to a platform. The operations part of the process is taken care of automatically after uploading the code.

Automation of the operations part saves cost and this has been one of the reasons why many companies are adopting it. Large companies such as Coca-Cola and Netflix are already using this approach in some parts of their system.

DevOps vs NoOps:

A decade ago, DevOps was still being viewed as a necessary disruptor that promised fast and quality deployments. Fast forward to today and DevOps is seen as a complicated system that requires too many resources to run.

With the rise of platforms that supported the automation of the deployment operations, organizations saw an opportunity to reduce the effort required to deliver their applications. The concept of eliminating the operations is attractive not only because of cost but also because of consistency. Let’s now look at the DevOps issues solved by the introduction of NoOps.

• Cost

“Automation is cost-cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them.”

The quote above describes exactly what NoOps does for organizations that adopt it in their software development lifecycle. By eliminating the team that is responsible for deploying and monitoring the applications, the organization can free up most of the expenses associated with it.

• Consistency

Consistency in quality and speed requires consistency in collaboration and productivity of all teams. For instance, in DevOps, there is often some hesitancy in implementing feedback that is received simply because the developers are preoccupied with other code issues they deem to be more important. The push by the operations team to have the changes implemented can easily lead to hostility between the operations and development teams. In a NoOps environment, developers feel more responsible for the applications and the issues raised because the process is fully under their control.

What does the future hold for DevOps engineers?

NoOps doesn’t mean the end of the road for DevOps engineers, No. However, it does mean that they’ll need to learn the skills that are necessary for setting up and maintaining a NoOps environment.

A challenge that many companies wishing to shift to NoOps face is the fact that they are still on monolithic legacy systems that cannot be taken up by existing PaaS solutions. Such systems would require alteration of their core features or complete rewrites to function in a PaaS environment.

NoOps guarantees a consistent safety net through which all changes must pass before the application can get to the end-users. The best NoOps platform makes the migration from DevOps feasible by allowing for easy integration with existing testing and validation tools.

Mike Gualtieri stated that “The last thing many application developers want to do is have a sit-down with the ops guys. Besides which, they don’t understand.” He added, “Sure, the ops guy’s efforts are critical to our applications because they have to run on something. But, developers should look to spend more of their time getting closer to the business, not getting closer to the hardware.”

The VP of Forrester acknowledges that there is a need for quicker and less-rickety deployment processes.

DevOps is a Step Backwards:

If you look at the important knowledge and operations that technologies like Kubernetes added to the daily workday of a DevOps engineer, you may even think that after we’re no longer living in the DevOps epoch, we’re living the “MoreOps” instead. More ops to secure your cluster, more ops to deploy your containers and secure them, more ops to deploy your hybrid or multi-cloud ..etc

NoOps is a Nirvanic state. We completely share the same thoughts as Mike Gualtieri: “(NoOps) means that application developers will never have to speak with an operation professional again. NoOps will achieve this nirvana, by using cloud infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service to get the resources they need when they need them.”

Start your NoOps journey with WildCard!

If NoOps Nirvana is your goal WildCard should be the way to reach it. Using Wildcard, it’s possible to automate deployment and monitoring operations with minimal coding. We’ve built a NoCode platform that allows for integration with most of the existing testing and validation tools.

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