When the DevOps Director leaves your company, they take their knowledge of your development operations infrastructure with them. If your DevOps infrastructure is not designed for continuity, this can complicate the process of filling their role and spell disaster for the development team.
Thankfully, it is possible to achieve a scalable DevOps infrastructure that ensures continuity during personnel changes — even at the highest level.
If your DevOps Director has built your infrastructure using custom code or a bespoke combination of tooling, they are the only person that understands how to troubleshoot that system when major problems arise. To put it another way, instead of enabling your entire DevOps team to solve problems, an unstandardized system makes the whole team reliant on your director to solve systemic issues.
This will invariably complicate the transition for new hires taking over a core DevOps role. New hires without critical knowledge of your system will have to waste time decoding your infrastructure before they can help solve problems. This can grind the entire development team to a halt if a major problem arises while the new team member familiarizes themself with your system.
A customized operations infrastructure also presents continuity problems for growing development teams. It is impossible to scale a custom infrastructure because it relies on the internalized knowledge of just a few team members. Over time, this knowledge gets diluted or lost at scale. Essentially, even if your current system works now, it won’t work forever.
As the development team grows, a standardized system allows new team members to onboard with existing knowledge, reducing training times and helping to screen qualified applicants. This is why it is so important for organizations to develop standardized infrastructure as early as possible to help align development operations with the long-term goals of the company.
A standardized DevOps infrastructure, leveraging Kubernetes, provides a common language for developers and DevOps specialists. Any team member with an understanding of that infrastructure will be able to troubleshoot problems at a high-level.
Additionally, these proven platforms allow your team to lean on a broader community for technical support, helping to ease the pressure on your director to provide all of the solutions.
End-to-end continuity also ensures feedback between development and deployment, helping to improve overall application quality. With less time and budget being spent on platform issues, developers are free to spend time innovating your product and shortening your development cycles. In the long-run, this helps mitigate the risk of developer turnover caused by frustration with broken or buggy infrastructure.
For companies of all stages and sizes, implementing a standardized infrastructure with a focus on DevOps is an investment that pays off. An unstandardized system does not utilize the full capabilities of your DevOps team because it relies too heavily on centralized knowledge.
Through employee transitions and company scaling, a standardized DevOps infrastructure allows your team to quickly solve problems and stay on the same page.
In the long-run, a standardized system aligns your DevOps with your company's long-term goals by helping to shorten application deployment cycles, improve application quality, and reduce time spent on platform issues.