DevOps has become a popular concept because it is important in a cloud-based environment. It involves automation of the testing and deployment of software builds. It is difficult to assess the readiness of an app if operations and development teams cannot communicate well. The software development cycle could be prolonged if the operations team just hands over the application to the development team. This is because there may have been miscommunications. Applications can be delivered faster if both teams work together. NoOps is an entirely new concept. It may soon replace DevOps. NoOps is simply a synonym for “No Operations.” In this blog, I will talk about NoOps, DevOps and the key differences between these concepts.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the ongoing interaction between the operations and development teams. This is not an end goal and is based upon software practices that innovate and automate the interaction between developers, operations teams and other team members. It is designed to decrease the number of iterations, deliver high quality software products quickly, and allow businesses to go to market faster. You might feel satisfied that you have finally achieved DevOps after all the hard work you put into it. The reality is quite different. Revolutions happen quickly in the IT industry. You have to be open and willing to change with the market. It is impossible to stop in the middle.
Cloud technology can solve complex problems and provide solutions. However, it requires exceptional skills to implement. Cloud technology is scalable, but it requires DevOps to run smoothly. You will need to do some manual work – someone must oversee the whole process. DevOps is a combination of cultural philosophies and different practices with tools that place a greater emphasis upon team collaboration. DevOps can also make fundamental changes in how organizations manage their overall development strategy. A modern software delivery team is made up of several specialized teams, such as:
- Development
- Quality assurance (QA).
- Infrastructure
- Security
- Support
DevOps is a way to bring together all these teams without affecting their specialties while creating a more collaborative environment. This allows for greater transparency of roles and responsibilities and provides more visibility to team members and teams. DevOps also relies heavily on automation to enable a rapid SDLC. Automation allows you to automate most tedious and manual tasks, such as infrastructure provisioning and testing. This automation can be made easier by the following tools:
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).
- Code for infrastructure
- Automation frameworks
- Automated monitoring
- Security tools
What is NoOps?
NoOps refers to the implementation of processes that automate IT infrastructure so that IT operations staff no longer have to do their daily tasks. This makes maintenance and operations completely automated so that no manual intervention is required. The IT operations team can now focus on innovation and other business aspects. Businesses are moving away from manual processes such as configuring firewalls, installing databases, manually installing apps and patches, and publishing the SSH keys. This is the beginning of NoOps.
This process removes developers from any infrastructural issues that could be distracting them from producing high-quality software and maximizing the benefits of cloud computing. This saves time and effort in dealing with IT operations for infrastructural problems. NoOps can also be enabled by technology, just like DevOps. There are many ways to make NoOps possible. Here are the most important ones:
- Serverless computing by major vendors such as AWS, Azure and GCP
- A PaaS solution or a cloud service hosted by Azure, AWS and GCP.
- A one-time manual intervention is required to create a replicable infrastructure.
These solutions can be used to automate the infrastructure as well as traditional deployment tools that drive the process and deliver applications. NoOps is a service that focuses on cloud-based architectures where infrastructure is less burdensome or entirely under the control of the service provider. NoOps software delivery is best illustrated by serverless architectures. Developers only need to build their applications and then deploy them in the serverless environment. This eliminates any infrastructure or operational concerns. NoOps might seem like the ideal operational strategy. It lacks the proper process management and team management practices that are built into NoOps. It can hinder collaboration in a delivery pipeline and also put an additional burden on developers to manage the entire application lifecycle without any operational assistance. NoOps can be used to augment DevOps by adding automation to a delivery process while maintaining a collaborative multi-team environment.
Key Differences: DevOps vs NoOps
Definition
DevOps refers to the merging of development and operational processes. NoOps is, on the contrary, the elimination of all operations (as the name suggests). NoOps is a platform administration component elimination program that aims to provide seamless connectivity between infrastructure and developers. DevOps can therefore be described as a continuous process and not a goal-oriented approach. NoOps on the other hand, has a clear goal to make everything easily deployable by design without any manual intervention.
Deployment Strategy
DevOps deployment is accomplished by deploying microservices on a Kubernetes Cluster with manual scaling parameters configuration. After the cluster has been created, each microservice of the application is deployed and the converted microservices are used to perform the functions.
NoOps deployment is accomplished by deploying the functions to a FaaSplatform. Functions can be invoked via an HTTP request from a user or another type of event within the FaaS platform. FaaS is responsible for providing resources and performing automatic scaling.
Benefits
Benefits of NoOps:
- It allows automation
- Maintenance costs are lower
- It can easily perform the tasks of microservices, cloud computing and cloud computing without using AWS or GCP.
- It does exactly what it is supposed to do
DevOps benefits:
- DevOps models ensure quality
- Security teams are better integrated with operations and development.
- Speed increases
- Rapid delivery
- It ensures reliability
- Managed and operated Scale
- Improves collaboration procedure
- Has short development cycles
Cons
Cons of NoOps:
- Only preserve the legacy
- You will get more if you compute less
- Security and compliance regulations
- Cloud cannot be foolproof
Cons of DevOps:
- Work culture is restricted
- Software engineering skills are required
- It is important to work in a team.
- Initial stage takes time
Shift to the Right
A DevOps culture has a team, usually the Ops team. This team is responsible for defining production monitoring, alerting, and other operations. Typically, developers monitor staging and development environments in a different way. You can make NoOps culture a reality by shifting the monitoring responsibility to the developers so that testing could occur in production (also known as “shifting right”). It was important for several reasons.
Developers are our main consumers as they push changes to production frequently. These frequent changes are too much for a separate team. The consumers should have a deep understanding of the code so they can find issues faster than the Ops team. An Ops team may find an issue after it has already affected a customer. However, a developer might spot an error log line or a small increase in failure rates before it becomes too serious.
Below is a table that summarizes the key differences between NoOps and DevOps.
| Details | DevOps | NoOps |
| Work Process | It improves collaboration between developers and the operations team to increase the quality and speed of software deployment | It automates everything |
| Infrastructure build | DevOps allocates infrastructure depending on full capacity workload | NoOPs calculate the price of cloud resources based on budget purposes and take into consideration from minimum to maximum expected usage |
| Configuration | It configures middleware platforms, operating systems, and hardware | It configures cloud images (or) elastic application platforms |
| Capacity Planning | The developers department and operations department work collectively to determine where the application can operate | NoOPs set up cloud resources that begin slowly and ramp as fast as necessary |
| Testing | DevOps offers the productive equivalent infrastructure for testing | NoOPs provides dev self-provisions testing resources, which is equivalent to production |
Why Do We Need More Than DevOps?
The matter is that, in the IT world, things change quicker than you. The market requirement is so much more demanding now that you cannot simply say: “I’m tired of changing, please give me a rest.” Cloud computing has made things more complex. Although it allows us to solve complex problems and implement solutions quickly, it requires more skill. Although all parts of your cloud can be scalable, it still needs to be configured with DevOps. This means you will always need to put in some effort. The majority of the work is still done by someone else. This means that you must continue to work the old way.
NoOps aims to create a process that doesn’t require you to combine development and operation in order to make things work. NoOps’ goal is to make everything easily deployable by design without any effort on the part of anyone. A NoOps approach basically means that the developer commits code to the repository, and then everything is deployed. Although it may look like continuous delivery, it is actually more. When we refer to deployment, we don’t just mean the application, but also the infrastructure.
Final Thoughts
PaaS (Platform as a Service) can be used to deploy many apps, but not all apps are eligible. PaaS works well for apps that are simple. DevOps would not be required to do much. If you want to launch something like Mega Netflix, however, you need to have greater control. DevOps, like NoOps, were born out of a need to create smart infrastructure that requires minimal maintenance and automate all aspects. NoOps is not a panacea and the relevance of NoOps can change from one case to another. It’s a buzzword in the world cloud transformation trends, but it is a temporary one. Both NoOps as well as DevOps have their place in the cloud transformation world.
