NoOps: What Does the Future Hold for DevOps Engineers?
Tags: devops, cloudnative, operations
Published: 2021-07-11 14:40:02

With cloud adoption on the rise, the level of abstraction in application architecture has increased— from traditional on-premises servers to containers and serverless deployments. The focus on automation has also increased to the point where manual intervention is no longer preferred, even for infrastructure-related activities like backups, security management, and patch updates. This desired state equates to a NoOps environment, which involves smaller teams that can manage your application lifecycle. Ideally, in such an environment, the efforts required by your operations team will be eliminated.

It is beyond debate that DevOps is now deeply integrated into the DNA of all cloud-first organizations and is today more of a norm than a rarity. Cloud applications demand agility, and DevOps delivers it. However, does NoOps mean the end of the DevOps era? Or is it simply the next step in the progression of DevOps?

## DevOps vs. NoOps

The success of DevOps greatly depends on the synergy between your development and operations teams, as it brings together system administrators and developers who would otherwise work in silos. Meanwhile, the process of continuous integration and continuous deployment is crucial in DevOps, which helps in identifying issues early on and avoiding them. This in turn results in the faster delivery of solutions. However, note that the operations team is still very much in the picture. There is still a dependency on the operations team to take care of nitty-gritties like: infra config management, security settings, backups, patch management, etc. 

With the cloud, abstraction and automation are scaling to new heights every day. You name it, and you can have it “as-a-service” in the cloud, be it compute, storage, network, or security, to list just a few. Cloud service providers are also investing heavily in their automation ecosystem. You can easily provision your application components using automation templates or just a few API calls. The ongoing management of these components can be automated as well, meaning less overhead to maintain environments and minimal to no human intervention. This leads us to NoOps—the increased abstraction of infrastructure, tightly integrated with development workflows, that requires no operations team to oversee the process. 

NoOps, a term originally coined by [Forrester](https://go.forrester.com/blogs/11-02-07-i_dont_want_devops_i_want_noops/), aims to improve productivity and deliver results much faster than DevOps. In the ideal scenario, developers never have to collaborate with a member of the operations team. Instead, they can use a set of tools and services to responsibly deploy the required cloud components in a secure manner, including both the code and infrastructure. Managed cloud services, like PaaS or serverless, serve as the backbone of NoOps and leverage CI/CD as their core engine for deployment. Hence, note that not all scenarios fit the bill for NoOps. 

## NoOps: Advantages and Challenges

NoOps and DevOps essentially try to achieve the same thing: improve the software deployment process and reduce time to market. But while the collaboration between developers and operations team was emphasized in DevOps, the focus has shifted to complete automation in NoOps. This may sound like a silver bullet, but this new approach comes with both advantages and challenges. 

### Advantages

#### 1. More automation, less headcount
NoOps shifts the focus to services that are deployable by design without manual intervention. From infrastructure to management activities, the aim is to control everything using code, meaning every component should be deployed as part of the code and maintainable in the long run. NoOps essentially seeks to eliminate the manpower required to support the ecosystem for your code. 

#### 2. Use the full power of the cloud
NoOps is best suited for born-in-the-cloud environments that leverage PaaS and serverless solutions. Microservices and API-based application architectures fit the bill perfectly, as they offer fine-grained modularity along with automation. Leading cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP have a laser focus on providing more services and capabilities in PaaS and serverless, which would help accelerate the adoption of NoOps. The current increase in database-as-a-service, container-as-a-service, and [function-as-a-service](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/functions/) options in the cloud favor this trend as well, and all of these technologies support extreme automation. 

#### 3. Shift from operations to business results
NoOps also shifts the focus from operations to business outcomes. Unlike DevOps, where the dev team and ops team work together to deliver value propositions to the customer, NoOps ideally eliminates any dependency on the operations team, which further reduces time to market. Again, the focus is shifted to priority tasks that deliver value to customers—in other words, “fast beats slow.” 

### Challenges

#### 1. You Still Need Ops
In theory, not requiring an operations team to take care of your infrastructure might sound lucrative. However, depending on the level of automation that’s achievable, you might still need them around to take care of exceptions or to monitor outcomes. Expecting developers to take care of this would nullify the benefits of NoOps and take away their focus from delivering business outcomes. It is also not a practical approach, considering that developers don’t necessarily have the required skill sets to address operational issues. For example, consider a Disaster Recovery (DR) scenario. You would still need support from an operations team to invoke the DR plan and switch traffic to the failover site.

#### 2. Consider Your Environment
Also, not all environments can transition to NoOps. Hybrid deployments and legacy infrastructures would pose a bottleneck—automation is still possible, but human intervention cannot be entirely eliminated in these cases. While aiming for NoOps, PaaS and serverless could become a limiting factor as well, especially during digital transformation. Additional efforts required to refactor legacy monolithic applications to fit the paradigms of PaaS would be counterintuitive. You would need to carefully evaluate the pros and cons, on a case by case basis, before embarking on the NoOps approach.

#### 3. Who Will Take Care of Security?
Last but not least is the question of security and compliance. Automated deployments aligned with security best practices will not completely eliminate the need for you to take care of security. Traditionally, there is a segregation of duties between operations and development teams. The operations team works together with the security team to enforce controls that protect applications from threats and vulnerabilities. The operations team, meanwhile, is also responsible for handling Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. 

Threat vectors and attack methods in the cloud evolve by the day, and so should your cloud security controls. The same goes for compliance. Not all organizations can delegate that responsibility to a set of automated processes. Reducing, or eliminating, the operations team could result in you needing to increase your investment in a security team to ensure the security and compliance of your environments.

## Destination NoOps

DevOps is considered more of a journey, not a destination, where the focus is on continuous improvement. It would be safer to say that NoOps is the evolution of DevOps, targeting a perfect end-state of extreme automation. It allows organizations to redirect time, effort, and resources from operations to business outcomes. However, this change cannot happen overnight. 

For NoOps to become a reality, a lot of groundwork is involved. You need to identify the right application stack and managed services in the cloud, i.e., PaaS and serverless, for the transition to happen. You need to bake in the component management, configuration, and security controls to get started. Even then, there would be some loose ends like legacy systems that would take more time and effort to transition or that cannot be transitioned at all. And if there’s even a single legacy system left behind, you would still need someone to take care of its operational aspects. 

In a NoOps world, the role of DevOps engineers also changes, as they get the opportunity to learn new skills and processes required for NoOps. Like DevOps, NoOps is more about the shift in culture and process, rather than technology. Organizations need to be intentional about this shift while staying grounded as to the practicalities of the transition.

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