Implementing NoOps: The End of IT Operations Teams?

Dan Jones (Product Sales Lead) 24-Aug-2022 10:45:00

News

In the world of IT, there is a new movement known as NoOps.

What is NoOps? Simply put, it's the elimination of dedicated IT operations teams.

With NoOps the goal is to remove the operations team and integrate it into the development team. We will explore how this works in the real world, and if its a fit for your team, in this post.

NoOps is not a new concept, the term was first used in 2009 by Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois. They were looking at the overlap between development and delivery and if the two could be merged, extending the scope of DevOps.

DevOps is all about collaboration between developers and IT operations teams. NoOps takes this one step further by eliminating the IT operations team and driving automation.

So how does this / can this work in the real world?

The responsibility for managing, maintaining and deploying applications and infrastructure shifts over to the dev team. Usually to an individual with a background in infrastructure management, replacing what was a full team.

Two main benefits to this approach are:

It speeds up the process of delivering new features. With NoOps, there is no need to wait for another team to make changes, the developers control the whole process
With NoOps, there is no need to hire another team to manage your deployments

You have to balance with the fact that developers usually hate managing and maintaining applications, they want to build / develop new things. This was the goal of any operations team, to get a consistent business-as-usual service for customers.

This means that many organisations have scaled back their IT operations teams and put in some form of cloud management to get a level of cover in case of emergency.

If you want to find out more, we have recently written an article with more details on this topic "NoOps: CloudOps delivers IT Operational Excellence for DevOps teams" this goes into much more depth on this topic.

Or if you want to see what CloudOps can do for your cloud deployments book a test drive.