April 19, 2026
The goal of DevOps is to create an environment where developers can quickly push changes to production. This is the core idea, and while it may seem simple, many mistakes are made in relation to DevOps.
Today we will discuss the eight most common errors that people make when building a DevOps pipeline.
Rule number one is to find a way to use the same environment for development, staging, and production.
Docker is a common choice. For a more secure option, consider using Podman.
Number two: hardcoding your secret environment variables into your pipeline. To be clear, security is a top priority. The reasons may vary, but for me, it’s not just about protecting against a potential attack from a malicious actor. It’s more about knowing my project follows the latest security best practices.
If a project doesn’t follow security best practices, can it really follow any best practices?
Common Solutions
Caching is crucial. As a DevOps engineer, your goal is to ensure fast releases. If your pipeline takes too long to complete, like an hour, then there’s a problem.
Common Solutions
Let me explain what I mean. I’ve seen software projects with multiple environments:
Development environment for development and unit testing
Test environment for system integration testing
Staging environment for end-to-end testing
Production environment
To keep it simple, if you’re a software architect who thinks your project needs four environments, you should reconsider.
Your project is probably not as critical as you think, and having four environments doesn’t make sense architecturally. It adds complexity, making it hard to bring in new team members, and creates an environment prone to errors.
Every company has the chance to excel in this area, but many don’t take it. Imagine your lead leaves for a new job and nobody knows where to find the Kafka cluster configuration. That’s a project failure.
The worst part is that writing documentation is now easy. With AI, you can create it quickly. Here’s a simple workflow:
The developer writes notes
The AI tool uses these notes and the codebase as input
A technical reviewer checks the generated documentation
It’s a straightforward process.
Although application architecture isn’t part of a DevOps engineer’s job, it’s still crucial. A monolithic application causes problems for the whole team. Readability is poor, DevOps pipelines are slow, and maintainability is difficult. The issues with this approach are numerous.
Even if it’s not your responsibility, you should advocate for a microservice or, ideally, an event-driven architecture. This will make your job easier in the long run.
I spent time working in quality assurance and learned some valuable lessons. One key takeaway is that outsourcing quality assurance can be beneficial for any project. Having a dedicated quality assurance team is crucial, even if they’re not always busy - ideally, that means things are going well.
This team adds an important element to the project’s culture. When a bug reaches production, the development team can turn to the quality assurance team. Conversely, the quality assurance team can hold the development team accountable when they find bugs in staging. It’s not about blaming each other, but about collaboration.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test early in your pipeline. However, relying solely on this approach won’t be enough for larger projects.
You can’t know what you can’t see.
Monitoring and logging help you see what’s happening. They are essential tools for any project. You need to set them up to track performance and fix issues. This way, you can react quickly to problems. Logging also helps you understand what happened when things go wrong. It’s like having a record of events.