L18 - DevOps 2 (Anti-patterns)

Question 1

What are the 9 DevOps Anti-patterns?

Answer 1

• DevOps team
• DevOps job title
• All the work, half the people
• Blame culture
• Silos
• Root cause analysis
• Human error
• Interrupting others
• Culture fits

Question 2

Explain why ‘DevOps as a team’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 2

• Requires more layers of communications → Increases miscommunication change
• Increases number of hand-offs required → Time consuming and room for error

Question 3

Explain why ‘DevOps as a job title’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 3

• Long-time development or operations worker may have issue or struggle implementing aspects of the other job
• It’s wasteful to have someone very good at operations to try and write code
• People can’t change as fast as you can change the label

Question 4

Explain why ‘All the work, half the people’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 4

• Based on the assumption that DevOps means you can do all the work with half the people
• Leads to overworking
• Paints a picture of ‘overworking’ e.g when asking an Operations expert to do development.
• They’ll just go elsewhere…

Question 5

Explain why ‘Blame Culture’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 5

• A culture of finger-pointing when things go wrong is not productive
• Blame culture leads to reserved, scared workers due to fear of getting wrong

Question 6

Explain why ‘Silos’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 6

• Siloed teams are strong internally, but lack integration with other teams, users, or any stakeholders
• Leads to poor knowledge, information, and experience sharing practices
• Teams should be kept from drifting into siloes

Question 7

Explain why ‘Root Cause Analysis’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 7

Anti-pattern due to their usually being more than one cause of an issue, or is very difficult to decipher the cause due to complexity of modern software (huge number of microservices and dependencies)

Question 8

What is Root Cause Analysis?

Answer 8

RCA → Attempts to identify the root cause of an issue in order to prevent the problem from recurring.

Question 9

Explain why ‘Human Error’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 9

• Due to incompetence, malice, or many other factors, humans may often make mistakes causing failure that other people would have done better
• Punishing this leads to an environment of fear and reservation.

Question 10

What is the solution to the Human Error anti-pattern?

Answer 10

• Avoid entirely blaming the person, ensure people learn from mistakes.

Question 11

Explain why ‘Interrupting Others’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 11

• People constantly talking over each other is an anti-pattern.
• Interruption causes communication to be competitive rather than collaborative.

Question 12

Explain why ‘Culture Fits’ can be considered an anti-pattern…

Answer 12

• Recruiting for culture fit is an anti pattern
• Can lead to teams that are toxic and narrow minded

Question 13

Why is it best to build inclusive teams?

Answer 13

• Prevents recruiting purely for culture fit
• Inclusivity brings variety of backgrounds, cultures and experiences that enhance productivity.