3 devops and cloud computing myths debunked

The global devops market size should reach $12.85 billion by 2025. This according to a study by Grand View Research, predicting an 18.6 percent compound annual growth rate during the forecast period.

Driving this is the usual suspects, including an increasing trend of enterprises automating business processes, and the rise in adoption of cloud computing. People are also changing: adopting agile frameworks and hoping to promote better collaboration between IT teams to enhance operational efficiency.

I’m not sure that much devops would occur without cloud computing. The ability to automate provisioning and change platform configurations on demand has led to development practices and tools that can compress speed-to-deployment to leverage those capabilities. Thus devops and cloud can support the business at the “speed of need.”

Despite the benefits, many enterprises are still limiting the use of devops and cloud computing, typically due to some misinformation or myths that are simply not true. Let me clear up three of them.

Myth 1: In order to deploy applications to the public cloud, devops toolchains need to operate there as well.

This is the myth that I hear most. The reality is that you can certainly leverage devops tools, such as continuous integration tools and continuous testing tools, in the public clouds. However, they are typically not the best of breed or may not meet your requirements in other ways. Most devops toolchains are a mix of on-premises and cloud-based tools, and that works just fine using any public cloud as the deployment target.

Myth 2: Using the cloud means not needing devops.

Devops is more about people and processes than tools and tricks. The idea is to remove the impediments of existing processes (such as waterfall) and improve the time that the applications are built or altered and the time they appear in production. Nothing about using cloud computing replaces the value of devops. Devops and cloud computing have a symbiotic relationship, and one suffers without the other.

Myth 3: Devops leads to cloud security issues.

It could—if you let incompetent people build and deploy applications without the proper security testing processes and tools and the right security mechanisms. Using devops with workloads, whether deployed to public clouds or not, should lead to better security since you can build security into the applications themselves. Devops testing should include security testing, and typically the security services in public clouds are much better than on-premises.

I hope these myths go away soon.