7 Promises and Potential Pitfalls in Adopting a Cloud-Native Approach to DevOps

Coming back from a DevOps conference sponsored by the software delivery automation tool maker CloudBees, I warned my friend and New Stack editor, Alex Williams, that I had talked with nearly everyone there about the “cloud-native” buzzword. On the plane back, I wrote him a very long note, listing all the various permutations of the concept of “cloud-native DevOps” I had heard. On my layover, I heard back from him that my note should be a New Stack article.

Image of the Burke and Gordimer lunar craters in the public domain.

“What I learned from this exercise is that DevOps may not be what any of us think it is. While we’ve often talked about the goal of DevOps being ‘software delivery’ or ‘service delivery,’ from the Ops side of the automation chain, “delivery” is where the maintenance and re-integration work begins, not ends. Delivery of software, I’m told, is the start of something. And the danger of an approach that ends up meaning the same as ‘cloud native’ does to many enterprises is that it outsources the Ops process to someone else. Sure, DevOps is really easy, said one fellow, if the Ops part were just imaginary.”