DevOps anti-patterns
Tool worship, ticket Ops, and other ways “DevOps” becomes a sticker instead of a practice.
Tool-shaped transformations
Buying CI/CD or Kubernetes and declaring victory. Instead: change ownership, batch size, and feedback loops; tools follow.
DevOps as a separate ticket team
All YAML and prod access behind one queue. Instead: paved roads + product ownership; platform for leverage.
Metrics that fight each other
Devs scored only on features; ops only on zero change. Instead: shared DORA-style outcomes and SLOs.
Hero culture
The same people save every incident and never get time to automate. Instead: blameless follow-ups that shrink toil.
Environments that lie
Prod-only config, manual snowflakes, “works in staging” rebuilt differently. Instead: IaC parity and promote-the-artifact.
Alert theater
Hundreds of pages, none actionable. Instead: SLI burn and runbooks; delete noise.
Security as a gate surprise
No scans until release week. Instead: policy in CI and design review for sensitive paths.
If your “DevOps” cannot explain who owns the next deploy and the next page, it is branding.