2. Life before DevOps

Before DevOps came into picture, software development, operations, QA, Security used to work in a completely different way. Teams were separate, processes were slow, and delivering software felt like a long, painful journey. This older way of working is generally called traditional IT model or pre-DevOps era.

1. Everyone worked in silos

• Developers sat on one side, operations on another side.
• They had very less communication.
• Developers wrote code and threw it to Ops saying “it works on my machine.”
• Ops team struggled to run the same code in production.

Result: misunderstandings, delays, and finger-pointing.

2. Manual work everywhere

• Code deployment was manual
• Server setup was manual
• Configuration was manual
• Testing was manual

Everything required human effort. This meant more mistakes, more rework, and slow delivery.

3. Slow and big releases

• Companies used to release software once in 3 months, 6 months, or even 1 year.
• Releases were huge, risky, and stressful.

On release day:

• Teams used to work overnight.
• Small issues became big failures.
• Rolling back was very difficult.

4. No continuous feedback

• Developers had no idea how their code behaved in production.
• Ops team didn’t know the intention of developers.

So, problems were discovered very late, sometimes after end-users complained.

5. Testing happened at the end after deployments

• Testing teams got the software at the last stage.
• Bugs came very late in the cycle.
• Fixing late issues took more time and increased cost.

6. Release days were full of stress

• Teams were afraid of deployments.
• Many people stayed awake the whole night to deploy code.
• A single wrong command could take servers down.

There was no automation or safety net.

7. Scaling was hard

If customer traffic increased:

• Ops team manually added servers.
• Configuration mismatched.
• Systems failed under load.

There was no concept of auto-scaling or container orchestration.

8. Blame culture was very common

When something went wrong:

• Developers blamed Ops.
• Ops blamed Developers.
• Testing team blamed both.

Teams were not aligned to one common goal.

9. No shared responsibility

• Developers cared only about writing code.
• Ops team cared only about keeping systems stable.
• QA was busy only with testing.

Nobody was responsible for the end-to-end product.

10. Tools and processes were not standard

Each team used their own tools:

• Dev used one tool
• Ops used another
• QA used something else