If you're interested in learning more about NoOps or considering implementing it in your own organization, our latest article is a great place to start. Take your first steps on the quest for completely automated IT operations.
This article assumes that your IT operations are in the cloud already or are moving to the cloud shortly and focuses on a cloud-based implementation with Amazon web services (AWS) and or Microsoft Azure.
NoOps is a term used in the tech industry to describe a company or organization that does not have an IT operations or engineering team.
NoOps is a term used to describe a business or organisational model where there is no dedicated operations team. This means that the responsibility for running and maintaining the cloud infrastructure falls to the developers instead. Proponents of NoOps argue that it can help organisations focus on their product roadmap instead of running cloud infrastructure.
NoOps, or no operations, is a movement in information technology (IT) that encourages the use of self-organizing principles to manage IT infrastructure. Proponents of NoOps believe that this approach can eliminate the need for dedicated IT operations staff, and instead rely on the collective intelligence and skills of the entire organization to manage and operate IT systems. While NoOps is still a relatively new concept, there are a number of organizations that have successfully implemented it and seen significant benefits.
In a typical NoOps organisation, developers are responsible for building, testing, and deploying their own applications. They also take on the responsibility for ensuring that their applications are running smoothly and are properly scaled. This usually requires developers to have a good understanding of how the underlying infrastructure works and how to use the appropriate tools and technologies.
Lee Thompson and Andrew Shafer summarised the conflict between operational and development teams as a "Wall of Confusion". The development team want to drive change and innovation, whereas the operations team want to maintain and deliver business as usual.
Managing an operation team can be very challenging. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that all members of the team are working together towards the same goal. If you could remove the need for an operations-focused team and get everyone focused on your project roadmap that can be a huge commercial advantage.
Operations teams play a critical role in businesses by managing the day-to-day tasks that keep the company running. However, managing an operations team can be challenging, as there are a variety of factors to consider. One challenge is ensuring that all tasks are completed efficiently and on time. This can be difficult when there are multiple tasks to complete and limited resources.
Additionally, it is important to ensure that all employees are properly trained and have the necessary skills to do their jobs. This can be a challenge when there are new employees or when employees need to be cross-trained in multiple areas.
Finally, it is important to ensure that the company's procedures and policies are followed correctly. This can be difficult when changes need to be made or when employees do not follow the procedures correctly.
Overall, an operations team focus is on providing reliable service to customers. Before making wholesale changes to your business operations you really need to consider how this goal will be achieved without an operations team.
Some of the key benefits of NoOps for SaaS / ISV include:
The end goal of NoOps is to automate away operations management and allow the organisation to focus on development. However, this doesn't all need to be done in one go!
NoOps can be achieved gradually by automating away routine tasks and moving towards self-service models. This can be done through the use of DevOps tools and techniques which help to speed up the process of getting new features into production. By automating processes such as change management, testing and deployment, organisations can free up time and resources to focus on development.
It's possible to move in this direction incrementally by slowly implementing automation and removing manual steps and by training developers to take on some of the operations tasks. This allows organisations to gradually move towards a NoOps model without making any sudden changes that could disrupt operations.
The headline line on our website for our AWS & Azure management software CloudOps is 'Focus on your software, not on managing infrastructure'.
This is what our customers who are independent software vendors (ISVs) or software as a service businesses (SaaS) tell us they were looking for when they found CloudOps. A way to reduce/remove the time they spend maintaining, provisioning and fire-fighting within their business.
That's not to say that all of them have removed those cloud infrastructure capabilities within their business. Many of them have development teams that as well as developers also include cloud architects or team members with other skills. It's just that implementing CloudOps has given them a level of visibility and control over the cloud platforms they were lacking before.
It has allowed them to focus on their roadmaps for their software products, not on the cloud management challenges they were facing. As a result, we have customers who are now able to move much faster with their product development than before and as a consequence are delivering new features and functionality to their customers at a pace that was not possible when they did not have CloudOps.
One of the first steps is to get full visibility of your cloud environment and understand where the time that is spent managing your cloud infrastructure goes. For more background on why we think cloud management software should be part of your AWS & Azure management strategy please read our article on the subject here.
Is it planned or reactive work that is taking attention away from your product roadmap? If it's reactive work on your cloud deployments then implementing CloudOps for unified cloud management across AWS & Azure can have an impact on day 1. CloudOps will give you visibility of cost, and maintenance and allow you to log risks and move towards becoming more planned in your cloud approach instead of fire fighting.
Implementing CloudOps across your cloud environment allows you to move towards a NoOps environment, where CloudOps provides the visibility, automation and recommendations to keep you on track. This move away from a team to manage and toward automation can be done incrementally and CloudOps can give you key recommendations around cost and maintenance processes.
Automation can't remove the need for expert advice in some instances such as new architecture implementation. For this reason, CloudOps Essentials and Professional also include provision for bundled support and advisory services. This allows you to call on expert advice and support when you need it at no additional cost. This gives you the cover you need for your cloud environment when you need it without having an operations team in-house.
You don't need to take our word for it, look at our case studies and how our ISV / SaaS business customers are utilising CloudOps to enable a NoOps approach.
You can also call us on 0151 332 3839 or 0203 697 0302 and speak to a member of our team.