NoOps, the future of cloud computing

In 2009, consulting firm Delloite , curious about the trends that the beginning of digital transformation was causing in large companies and different sectors of the economy, created a study to survey the digital technologies employed at the time.

Ten years later, the booming technologies in 2009 became obsolete . Regarding the maturity of digital transformation , Deloitte says: “ To stay ahead of the market, organizations must work methodically to envision new innovations and possibilities, set their ambitions for the future and go beyond the digital frontier.”

Sounds like a difficult task, doesn't it? But not so much. Many previous trends remain important today, have only been refined and continue to evolve. These include analytics and cloud computing , for example.

The use of artificial intelligence remains paramount, but it is now necessary to step in and completely re-evaluate the way humans and machines interact within the workplace.

Next, let's focus on a new cloud computing innovation, NoOps. And cite the main differences between her and DevOps .

A little more about DevOps environments

DevOps is an IT business model that ensures area integration and process simplification. This decreases rework and increases delivery efficiency. 

The term DevOps derives from the junction of the words “development” and “operations,” being a software engineering practice that aims to improve integration between software developers and the infrastructure team. 

As for the benefits, we can mention:

• Increased amount and frequency of updates delivered on a given system;
• Ability to keep structure stable while operating fast;
• Shortened average repair time, because the methodology speeds up its own maintenance, with constant monitoring and testing of the applications being developed.

New in NoOps Environments

NoOps is the next stage in the evolution of cloud computing. In this environment, software-defined software and hardware are dynamically provisioned. 

In addition, with serverless computing, traditional infrastructure and security management tasks can be fully automated, whether by cloud providers or solution development teams. 

Free from server management responsibilities, the operations professional can take on new roles, such as computer engineering, that help drive business results.

Now, as part of a growing trend, CIOs are taking their automation efforts to the next level from serverless computing. The goal is to create a noOps IT environment that is automated and abstracted from the infrastructure so that only very small teams are needed to manage it. 

CIOs can then invest human capacity surplus in the development of new value-added capabilities to increase speed and operational efficiency.

The goal of achieving purely NoOps environments may take several years to achieve, but in all sectors the transition, however preliminary, is underway.

Benefits of NoOps Environments

With the implementation of NoOps, CIOs seek to:

• Infinite scalability and high availability 
• Fewer operational functions. Even though some specific tasks, such as debugging (process for identifying and removing hardware and software errors) remain internal, infrastructure management is completely outsourced;
• No downtime costs. In a serverless computing model, consumers pay only for the duration of a function's execution and the number of functions performed. In terms of cost, this represents an improvement over legacy cloud computing models, where users are charged hourly for running virtual machines.

DevOps x NoOps

Despite what they say, the emergence of NoOps does not mean the end of DevOps. In fact, NoOps is just the beginning of the innovations that can be achieved in conjunction with DevOps.

As we saw above and in this previous post , the main purpose of the DevOps model is to increase the speed and efficiency of the software deployment process through collaboration between development and operations teams. 

The NoOps approach has the same goal of improving deployment while relieving developers of any infrastructure issues by avoiding wasted time interacting with system administrators. 

With NoOps, developers just write code, make push changes, and, through appropriate build systems, the related application is automatically produced, ready for deployment. 

That is, the development team no longer needs to communicate with system administrators and time is left to resolve just the infrastructure. 

We can say that NoOps represents a step forward in innovation and, thanks to the right tools, enables a faster deployment process. 

How to implement the NoOps method?

There are a number of Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions available in the marketplace to automate the deployment process and give developers a chance to build applications on their own without the help of administrators.  

These solutions provide a set of services to orchestrate and manage application execution by scaling the infrastructure according to the needs of each application. 

In addition, PaaS solutions include a significant number of features including servers and operating system maintenance. 

The NoOps model seems advantageous, but the need to manage infrastructure remains, as does the need to manage information about who uses the services and related costs. 

Also, not all applications are compatible with the latest PaaS solutions and the related transition to full automation can cause difficulties for businesses.

In short, the NoOps model follows the same principles and culture as DevOps, so its evolution can be considered, but it will not yet be able to fully detach itself from the development of operations.

Source: https://blog.cedrotech.com/noops-o-futuro-da-computacao-em-nuvem/