DISCOVER DEV.PRO’S EXCLUSIVE CTO DINNERS. 
If you have always dreamt of becoming an early adopter of a technical breakthrough, here is your chance. After all, those who recognize an opportunity early get to reap the most benefits.
As a software development vendor who witnessed the DevOps evolution early on, we thought that we’d share our observations on all things LowOps [and some things NoOps, too].
TLDR:
- Yes, it’s here to stay.
- Yes, it’s the next natural progression phase after DevOps’ advent.
- Yes, NoOps is a complete autopilot with respective pluses and minuses, while LowOps gives you the best of both worlds.
Got 7 minutes for the TLR? Let’s start with the fundamentals of LowOps.
What Is LowOps?
LowOps is a set of practices and tools that allow users to simplify and streamline software deployment, testing, and IT operations merging these complex processes into a highly integrated automated ecosystem with little coding.
LowOps is an evolutionary advancement of DevOps.
While DevOps was created to streamline code transition from developers to operations and testers, LowOps aims to convert the DevOps as we know it today into a still more simplified and automated process.
And you don’t have to be a DevOps engineer to use a LowOps platform. It’s got a plug’n’play straightforwardness to it.
Cycle.IO LowOps platform promises “simplicity without compromise”
LowOps vs NoOps
NoOps is also a relatively newly coined term that presents the ultimate environment and framework for deploying and maintaining the code, when near-zero coding is required.
However, what we find at the beginning of 2023, is that many experts use LowOps and NoOps interchangeably. As both terms and the concepts behind them are still in their early days, they are sure to further evolve. And we know that LowOps is more of a third-party vendor type of tool that will cater for hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. NoOps solutions are usually designed by one of the major CSPs [cloud service providers, like AWS, GCP, or Azure].
In the table below, we illustrate how IT teams’ responsibilities shifted with the invention of cloud computing, containers, and advancements in AI and ML. Moving away from the bare metal on the prem deployment model, businesses can now opt to take care only of specific parts of the environment and infrastructure, choosing between PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and CaaS.
These cloud service models enable a tighter integration of testing and deployment into the continuous development environment, having given rise to DevOps—and now to LowOps and NoOps. IT Ops used to manage components, then Sys Ops and DevOps had to deal with systems, and now LowOps and NoOps engineers manage resources.
Remember we discussed how rewarding it is to be among the early adopters? Let’s give you a different perspective: see how LowOps and NoOps are nearly non-existent on Google Trends, while DevOps has been gaining popularity for a decade? Chances are the trends may significantly change in 3–5 years.
Along the lines of emerging technologies, Gartner has coined another term for this tech trend: platform engineering. The global leading advisor on all things digital transformation foresees that as many as 80% of software development companies will have some sort of internal teams responsible for creating reusable tools and workflows to deploy applications.
“Platform engineering emerged in response to the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-expert end users are often asked to operate an assembly of complicated arcane services. To help end users, and reduce friction for the valuable work they do, forward-thinking companies have begun to build operating platforms that sit between the end user and the backing services on which they rely.”
Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner
Since we’re in the early days of this phenomenon, if users end up calling it LowOps or platform engineering, the core technology behind it will make app development a less labor intensive and a more controlled process.
Benefits of LowOps
Even in its budding form, LowOps provides many advantages for its users. We expect that with the development of third-party LowOps platforms, open-source tools, and multi-cloud solutions, users will have even more benefits to enjoy.
Lower Labor Costs
Automation cannot substitute human intelligence altogether, but it can certainly simplify some processes, making part of the existing workforce redundant.
More Time for Development & IT Operations
When the IT environment is fully automated, as in the NoOps and LowOps model, developers can focus on creating more code of higher quality, while IT operations get more time for infrastructure management and cost control.
Lower Human Error Factor & Its Impact
Environment setup is always going to be a human’s job. Each tick in settings can still be mistakenly checked or unchecked. However, automation overall minimizes human errors and reduces their negative impact.
Better Cloud Cost Optimization
Cloud Cost Management is one of the top concerns after security for many cloud-based businesses. LowOps systems is a serverless computing model, which allows users to pay for consumed capacity and reduce—or even eliminate—the idle time.
So, this new set of best practices and tools to manage your infrastructure and deployment will enhance all major KPIs for a tech company: increase efficiency, decrease costs, and enhance team loyalty.
What’s the tradeoff for all those benefits? Let’s review some of the challenges associated with this set of IT practices.
LowOps Challenges
What do tech companies need to be aware of when considering adopting LowOps best practices?
The Risks of the Unknown Terrain
We don’t know what we don’t know.
When stepping on terra incognita—let alone a technical one—it’s best to safeguard your path with advice from experts. The best practice is to conduct a test trial period with a few LowOps tools so that you can gain more first-hand experience on the way.
On the other hand, when all your competitors switch to the LowOps, the ROI from this framework cannot be such an efficient competitive advantage. So, just treading carefully and consulting DevOps experts with relevant experience is the best way to mitigate this obvious risk.
Compatibility
The market for the LowOps platforms is only evolving, which means some tools won’t comply with certain cloud providers and delayed updates.
If you stick with one of the major cloud suppliers, you may consider some of the NoOps platforms like Amazon Lambda, Google Firebase, and Heroku.
LowOps systems are more agnostic with respect to CSP and will usually support multiple cloud products in one dashboard for the best overview.
Lack of Experts
DevOps engineers are in high demand, so they can be tough to track down. The broad range of existing tech stack and its constant expansion require a lot of learning en route.
That said, NoOps and LowOps engineers are only starting to evolve, along with this newly emerging concept and framework.
Security Considerations
While the LowOps’ core mission is to automate all functions to maintain the infrastructure, security, and compliance, it still needs tending to on the client’s side.
So, a company switching to a LowOps environment needs to ensure that internal security is looked after. This includes tasks like vulnerability prevention and management, role and access control, and the monitoring and alerting of privileged users’ activities.
Why a Trend to LowOps?
Automation has proven high ROI investment for many industries and processes in manufacturing—and now it’s bringing efficiencies and saving dollars for budgets in technology companies, too.
Cloud Cost optimization has been the talk of the tech town for a decade, as cloud services providers management and infrastructure maintenance is only becoming more sophisticated and nuanced.
“We at Dev.Pro welcome progress and relentless evolution. Even though the ever changing tech stack, tools, frameworks may get a bit tiring at times. On the other hand, once you master the tool and advantages become obvious, it turns into your superpower and everyone gets to benefit: a developer, their employer, their client and the final users too. LowOps is a bit of the terra incognito as we are DevOps aficionados, but we are always on the lookout for new technology. Having tested the Cycle.io, I was definitely pleased with the ease of setting up the infrastructure and the single pane of glass for all servers. I will surely consider the tool for new upcoming projects with limited DevOps resources for maintenance.”
Dmytro Morhul: DevOps Engineer, Team Lead
Growing Complexity of Cloud Environments and Tools
As bigger companies get access to the prime DevOps engineers and cloud architects, they can better leverage the possibilities lurking in the multi-cloud, hybrid ecosystems, while smaller players lag behind, lacking the talent to navigate the ever growing complexity.
If a decade ago only a programmer could create a website, now a student can use Wix or Shopify, drag-and-drop website builder, and put up a solid page in under a day. Similarly, with LowOps tools a much more complex technical concept is getting its plug’n’play, drag-and-drop version.
Dire Lack of Talent
Naturally, the DevOps engineers are a sought-after breed of technical talent who play a mission-critical role in the current SDLC.
As the DevOps tech stack and infrastructure management platforms develop, it’s not unlikely that DevOps engineers will soon evolve into a purely strategic role with little-to-zero manual tasks to attend to. Smaller companies with modest development requirements may find that their developers can overtake the DevOps functions altogether with these new tools.
As the LowCodeOps and NoOps become more and more adopted, DevOps experts will also evolve to harness the LowOps best practices and offer them to SMBs as part of the PaaS / CaaS [Container as a Service] offering.
Different Tools for Different Infrastructure Providers
The multi-cloud environment is what bigger players opt for to better right-cost and right-size their cloud services and avoid any potential risks from vendor lock-in. Multi-vendor cloud service has proven to be a great option for backup / failover / failsafe. By having deployments across multiple providers using High Availability, a separate backup is no longer required.
Hybrid cloud environments are used to better balance the cost / security ratio, with 82% of IT leaders reporting using this model.
On top of that, you also have vendor tools and open-source tools, vendor-agnostic platforms and the systems with limited compatibility.
Even though the competition makes the cloud service provider game more and more platform and vendor-agnostic, the compatibility issue and the mere abundance of choices adds a layer of complexity.
Leaders Getting Comfortable
When it comes to containerization, Kubernetes and Docker are leading the market and setting trends.
However, the technology industry is one of those unforgiving niches: any form of staleness and lagging behind in the comfort zone is punished by new emerging products pretty fast.
The most popular version of one of the leading containerization platforms, Kubernetes, for example, was over a year behind. This results in higher security risks and potential instances of instability when updates get applied.
Existing containerization tools are rather complex and require a lot of expensive DevOps engineers to deploy and maintain.
On the other end of the spectrum, users get emerging NoOps PaaS solutions that simplify the complexity of infrastructure management and deployment to the extent that you give up ownership of infrastructure and lose any customizability.
LowOps is in the middle, offering the simplicity of the NoOps solutions but with precious technical privileges of customization and scalability.
As it stands right now, major leaders in the industry are pretty safe, since new emerging products get created from scratch, avoiding all the mistakes of the legacy systems.
On the plus side, competition is great for consumers in particular and industry advancement in general, so we at Dev.Pro love the idea of leaders not resting on their laurels.
Best LowOps Platforms To Try
As the realm is fairly new [you know it is when there is not yet a Gartner Magic Quadrant for LowOps platforms], these are some of the established and up-and-coming tools that feature little-to-no coding for infrastructure management:
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Fargate
- Cycle Platform
This list is evolving, as new tools enter the space all the time. If you have your favorite, do reach out to the Dev.Pro marketing team, so we can include more options.
Considering a Move to a LowOps Platform? Look Out for These Key Technical Characteristics
LowOps tools are a great way to save on labor cost, as tech talent is not only rare but also rather heavy on the budget. SMB often opts for SaaS, CaaS, and PaaS models to host their software products—and SMB is also often super sensitive to costs.
These considerations make SMB the first potential beneficiary of the development of this new deployment religion that LowOps and NoOps will inevitably become.
The key technical characteristics that resonated with our DevOps experts and that we recommend are:
- Automatic platform updates
- Platform-agnostic
- Supporting multi-cloud solutions
- Compatible with major cloud service providers
- Scaling-friendly
- Featuring multi-provider provisioning API
- Access to numerous regions and datacenters in different countries
- Geared towards automation
Need more info or DevOps consulting? Let’s talk.
LowOps: Jumping on a Bandwagon? Talk to Dev.Pro DevOps Experts
If you are considering testing a LowOps tool or have conducted enough research to move to one of the LowCodeOps tools, consult our DevOps engineers for a smooth transition.