DevOps Is Not a One-Time Setup: First-Year Lessons from the Field

Introduction

When teams start on their DevOps journey, the excitement is real.

CI/CD pipelines, faster deployments, cloud-native tools, automation everywhere – it feels like everything is finally going to be smooth. But in reality, the first year of DevOps is rarely smooth. It’s messy, experimental, and full of learning.

Devops

At To The New, while working with multiple products and clients, we’ve seen a clear pattern:
Teams don’t struggle because they picked the “wrong” tools –  they struggle because DevOps is rushed, misunderstood, or treated like a one-time setup and then forget about it.

Here are some of the most common mistakes teams make in their first year of DevOps, along with what actually works in real projects.

1. Treating DevOps as a Tool Setup, Not a Team Practice

One of the earliest mistakes we often see is this assumption:

“Once Jenkins is live and deployments are automated, DevOps is done.”

In reality, that’s just the beginning. What We’ve Seen in Projects:

• Developers push code and “throw it over the wall.”
• Ops teams own deployments and firefighting
• Production issues are handled by a small group, often at odd hours

What Works in Real Teams. In successful projects at TTN:

• Developers participate in release discussions
• Production issues are debugged together
• Ownership is shared, not assigned
• DevOps starts working when everyone feels responsible for the application — not just the pipeline.

2. Overengineering CI/CD in the First Few Months

Another very common pattern: teams try to build a perfect pipeline from day one.

• Multiple approvals.
• Complex branching strategies.
• Too many checks before a simple change can go live.

What Goes Wrong? We’ve seen pipelines where:

• A small config change takes hours to deploy
• Developers bypass automation because it’s “too slow.”
• CI/CD becomes a blocker instead of an enabler
• A Better, Practical Approach

The teams that succeed usually:

• Start with a simple build → test → deploy flow
• Add quality checks only when there’s a real need
• Improve pipelines based on real failures, not assumptions
• A basic pipeline that teams trust is far more valuable than a complex one nobody enjoys using.

3. Considering Security In “Phase Two.”

In the early stages, speed is crucial, but avoiding security always backfires.

What We Typically Learn Later

• Teams frequently discover during audits or incidents:
• Configurations and pipelines contain hardcoded secrets.
• IAM roles have a lot of permissions.
• Access was given “temporarily” and was never taken away.
• It is dangerous and painful to fix these later.

What Is More Effective? In completed TTN projects:

• Secrets are not managed in pipelines, but rather centrally.
• Early enforcement of least-privilege access
• CI/CD includes basic security checks; they are not an afterthought.
• Ignoring security will undoubtedly slow you down, but it doesn’t have to.

4. Focusing on Deployment Speed, Ignoring What Happens After

Many teams invest heavily in CI/CD but don’t think much about observability. Everything looks fine until production breaks. Typical Early-Stage Problems

• Logs exist, but no one understands them
• Alerts are either too noisy or completely silent
• MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) keeps increasing
• We’ve seen incidents where teams had deployments but no visibility.

What Makes a Real Difference

• Monitoring what actually matters (not everything)
• Clear, meaningful alerts
• Logs that help debug, not confuse
• Fast releases only matter if teams can detect and recover from issues quickly.

5. Inconsistent Infrastructure Across Environments

Early on, infrastructure often grows organically.

• Staging looks one way.
• Production behaves differently.
• Manual fixes sneak in.

The Result

• “It works in staging, not in prod.”
• IAAC drift
• Troubleshooting becomes guesswork

What Strong Teams Do Differently

• IAAC is non-negotiable
• Environments are kept as similar as possible
• Manual changes are avoided or tracked
• Consistency saves time, effort, and a lot of frustration later.

6. Expecting DevOps to Eliminate Failures

This is more of a mindset issue. Some teams expect DevOps to:

• Prevent incidents completely
• Make deployments risk-free
• Remove operational stress overnight
• Fix everything

What Actually Happens

• Incidents still occur
• Failures still happen
• Pressure builds on DevOps engineers

In real projects, DevOps:

• Reduces risk, not removes it
• Improves recovery, not perfection
• Encourages learning through failures
• DevOps methodology is a continuous improvement journey, not a magic switch.

7. Creating a “Single DevOps Hero.”

We’ve seen this too often. One person becomes:

• The pipeline owner
• The infra expert
• The on-call firefighter
• Everything depends on them.

Why This Is Risky

• Knowledge stays with one person
• Team velocity depends on availability
• Burnout becomes inevitable
• What Sustainable Teams Do
• Document everything
• Automate repetitive tasks
• Spread DevOps knowledge across the team
• DevOps should reduce dependency, not create new bottlenecks.

8. Ignoring Cloud Costs Until They Become a Problem (No FinOps Mindset)

In the first year of DevOps, most teams are focused on making things work. Cost is usually discussed much later, often when a bill suddenly spikes. We’ve seen this happen across multiple cloud projects.

What We Commonly See in Early-Stage Projects

• Services over-provisioned “just to be safe.”
• CPU and memory are set much higher than actual usage
• Logs are retained forever because no one reviewed the retention policies.
• Non-production environments running 24×7

None of these are mistakes made intentionally –  they happen because cost ownership is unclear. In several production environments, we noticed:

• ECS tasks use double the required CPU
• Memory limits copied across services without validation
• Large EBS volumes were created during early experiments and never resized
• These decisions worked technically, but quietly increased monthly costs.

What Works Better: Shift FinOps Left. Teams that handle this well don’t treat cost as a finance-only topic. Instead, they:

• Review resource usage regularly (CPU, memory, storage)
• Right-size services based on actual metrics, not assumptions
• Apply different cost strategies for prod vs non-prod
• Clean up unused resources as part of routine work.

Small, consistent optimizations often save more than one big cost-cutting exercise later.FinOps is not about restricting teams. It’s about making teams aware of the cost impact of their technical decisions.

When engineers understand:

• What do they deploy?
• Why does it cost what it costs?
• How to optimize without hurting performance
• Cloud spending becomes predictable instead of surprising.

Final Thoughts

The first year of DevOps is not about getting everything right. It’s about learning what works for your team. From our experience at To The New, teams that succeed with DevOps usually:

• Focus on engineers and ownership, not just tools
• Build systems in phases
• Treat failures as feedback
• Encourage collaboration across roles
• DevOps isn’t about perfection.
• It’s about being consistent, practical, and honest about what needs improvement.

And that mindset makes all the difference. Reach out to us for your devops workload because this is what we specialise in!