โWeโre NoOpsโeverything is in the cloud and we have no infrastructure to manage.โ Before running that victory lap and shifting everyone to the dev side, consider several NoOps risks carefully. Iโm really thinking about teams using all-SaaS stacks, especially in martech, edtech and other areas. However, the rise in microservices and serverless means more teams are leaning toward NoOps. At least a few people on your team should always watch for rogue issues on the ops side of the equation.
Locked-in Vendors
Risk: Cloud-based tools in the same category rarely have the same functionality. Once one is selected, youโre committed to its specific features. Moving away from a tool may mean dropping a popular application feature or changing workflow with coding to recreate functionality.
Mitigation: Evaluate unique features and customized data fields carefully before use. Solving data format differences is relatively easy for common fields. Look for tools with well-documented APIs and integrations or connector support for analytics. If there are no integrations out there, thatโs a red flag.
Ghosting
Risk: Lock-in becomes a big problem if the vendor ghosts. SaaS startups often meet one of two fates: they are acquired or they crash and burn. A tool critical to your workflow may disappear overnight. In the acquisition scenario, you may have some time and support in migrating from your tool to its successor.
Mitigation: Always have a Plan B for every cloud-based tool in your stack. Competitors are introducing new tools frequently. A trade study done two years ago may be completely obsolete on todayโs fast-moving landscape. Proactive migration to newer solutions may reduce vendor risk and improve features.
Limited Observability
Risk: Overheard in a conference recentlyโThose who develop the code are more motivated to build in useful observability for those in operations if those folks are the same team. In NoOps, thatโs not in play. If a cloud-based tool in your stack is down frequently or providing strange results, it may be very difficult to tell what is happening. Observability is often replaced by faith that the SaaS vendor has done its job and you arenโt experiencing a corner case it hasnโt tested.
Mitigation: Observability and monitoring arenโt the same, but when you donโt have observability inside SaaS tools, monitoring helps. Application performance management (APM) tools are emerging with new ways to build instrumentation around microservices. Create test cases with synthetic data to check your functionalityโyouโll need these to provide evidence for the vendor in any bug report.
Unoptimized Workloads
Risk: Youโre also often at the mercy of the SaaS vendor when it comes to speed of results. Itโs a common tripping point to pilot a SaaS workflow with a few users and test cases, and then find out it doesnโt scale when everyone is brought in.
Mitigation: This is one the biggest NoOps risks where ops expertise pays off. Where is the problem, exactly? Application problems may be candidates for workload accelerationโsuch as running on a GPU (or FPGA) enabled cloud instance. Reporting problems may be better-suited for an analytics tool, which can be run offline with extracted data.
Tangled Analytics
Risk: Every SaaS tool reports different metrics in different ways. Worse, users in a multi-cloud environment face learning and visiting multiple applications to look at data. Different applications report similar facts using different terms. As the tool stack and data sets grow, it takes longer and longer to analyze data.
Mitigation: Dashboards pay off early with one destination for data across the stack. Earlier, I mentioned the need for integrations or connectorsโthis should be a requirement for tool selection, both in the stack and the analytics tool. Deciding on which KPIs to track in the dashboard also focuses conversation and minimizes digging.
Closing NoOps Risks
Thereโs also the big topic of multi-cloud security and compliance, probably worth a series of posts by themselves. An Ops team working proactively in tool selection can comprehend many security risks before committing to tools and exposure. More value unfolds over time, as the security posture evolves with discovery of new threats.
The tech pendulum is always swinging. For many organizations, NoOps swings the pendulum a bit too far from DevOps and leaves risks open. A better philosophy is MinOps, where a small team is deployed, watching for and even anticipating problems.
Iโd be interested to hear if youโve tried NoOps and been successful over time, or if you reverted to a MinOps approach.




