Organizational and cultural aspects aside, it’s mainly a modern tech stack that allows startups to enjoy the DevOps benefits we’ve just mentioned. Still, you need to choose and use your tech wisely—if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for excess technical debt that will drag your processes down, as we’ll show you below.
Let’s look at what makes the difference in successful DevOps adoption.
A well-architected infrastructure in the cloud
Public cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure offer a wide range of services that help build a robust cloud infrastructure. Companies that adopt cloud computing from the start have easy access to perks like HPC, microservices, serverless computing, and CI/CD—everything DevOps best practices require to build a well-architected infrastructure.
Amazon’s guide to the AWS Well-Architected Framework gives a detailed description of what a well-architected infrastructure means. This concept allows developers to create a reliable, secure, and highly efficient infrastructure for your software or application. In short, building it involves optimizing five key areas:
Business processes involve automation, daily operations management, and disaster recovery scenarios. When these are poor, companies will struggle with infrastructure issues even if they have a top-notch developer team. The reason? Poor communication and the absence of a tactical plan for when something goes wrong. In short, task number one for startups is to optimize business processes.
This covers data security and confidentiality, user role management, and indication. These are particularly important considerations when developing architecture from scratch.
Sustainability involves preventing failures and swiftly recovering when disaster strikes.
This is about using your IT resources wisely. It mostly concerns choosing the right tech stack, calculating workload, monitoring efficiency, and making data-driven decisions.
- Cost of infrastructure maintenance
Cost efficiency is key for any newly established company. Optimizing the infrastructure cost means planning a budget and analyzing your spending over time.
As you can see, a well-architected infrastructure isn’t just about using the best tech for the job—it's also about business process optimization. This is why a team lead or CTO is vital for establishing a robust infrastructure. This professional should have the experience and knowledge to understand your product and make the best decisions regarding its tech stack.
Infrastructure automation (IaC)
Infrastructure automation (also known as infrastructure as code, or just IaC) beats common problems like “it works on my machine” or “oops, I did it again.”
It may be quite difficult to automate everything in the beginning, especially given the high pace of change in a DevOps startup. But any effort you make to apply IaC principles to your infrastructure will pay off: a more or less stable application and architecture dramatically reduces the risk of human error, improving service availability.
Containerization
Why do we need containers at all? Having a team of developers working together on the same repositories requires proper setup of dev and test environments, so nobody gets to say, “It works on my PC, so it's not my problem anymore.” Docker can be used to make sure that all developers use the same environment configuration. With this set up, once an application works with a new feature on the dev machine, it has a much higher chance of working in other environments too.
You've probably heard about Docker orchestration tools, and the best-known is Kubernetes. This is a double-edged sword: if developers don't have enough experience with Kubernetes, it can slow down your startup product development process. But once it’s configured properly and combined with tools like Skaffold, it can take development speed to another level.
Log management and the ability to get quick feedback on issues with an application are crucial to helping developers pinpoint root causes fast.
Your choice of tools for log management and monitoring will depend on the stack you've chosen for your application. For example, if you have a setup in GCP or AWS, there are natively supported log management services with centralized access to application logs. If, on the other hand, you don’t have a built-in log monitoring feature but still need a solution for debugging an application or getting notified about exceptions, tools like Rookout and Sentry can help.
Resource monitoring isn’t mission-critical in the early stages, but its usefulness increases with the need to meet “ready-to-production” deadlines and make data-driven decisions.
Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)
Good code is written according to best practices, company principles, and programming language standards. The secret is to get the team around your tech lead to understand why it's important to use Git branches and pull requests instead of constantly pushing into master “because it's faster.”
Why is Git so important for CI? Because poor development flows are the root cause of problems when setting up proper continuous integration (before you even get to continuous delivery). When the Git workflow is defined well, and the entire team (or at least most of it) is using it properly, it’s easy to set up a good CI flow. Which brings us to testing.
Let's face it: startups need to deliver fast, so most teams ignore tests until it's too late. And by then, you have a problem. Even if you aren’t ready to change everything from the ground up, you can at least try to start small with linters and basic unit tests. Having some CI processes in place is better than having none at all.
What about the testing workflow for CD? For sure, it's good to have one, but most likely, there aren’t many automated tests in your application, and most of the tests are done manually by a QA engineer or product/project manager. To get ahead with the CD setup, plan how to shift testing left.
Avoiding technical debt
As we’ve pointed out, implementing technology is not enough. Instead, it’s important to implement technology well from the outset.
As a startup, you’re already working 24/7 to satisfy your investors and clients. When developers can’t keep up with the pace or don’t have enough expertise in the required technologies, work shifts to fighting fires and just doing the best people can, not what should be done. This is how technical debt builds up.
So what is technical debt?
Technical debt is the final cost of additional reworks and refactoring that’s caused by choosing the wrong or easiest solution in haste rather than using best practices.
What are the top reasons for technical debt?
In a startup context, technical debt usually stems from the following issues:
- Pressure on the business from investors and impatient customers
- A lack of experience in team management (and poor understanding of the consequences of bad management)
- Inflexible monolithic systems
- Poor code quality
- No time for tests
- Skimpy or inexistent documentation
- Miscommunication between teams
- Team members that don't fully understand business goals and start taking too much responsibility for decision-making
The biggest problem with technical debt is that it snowballs fast. The longer you keep the existing infrastructure without refactoring, the more bogged down you get.
How can a startup avoid technical debt?
You can't completely avoid technical debt—after all, trends generally change too fast for you to keep up with them. But you can still reduce the risks that debt will build up.
If time is your biggest challenge, choose an experienced team with specialists that have hard skills in DevOps for startups, understand the business context, and know how to build team communication. This costs more but saves time overall.
If, on the other hand, you’re struggling with a tight budget, time is your greatest asset. Plan each project stage with a detailed description, and follow it step by step. The most important thing here is to have a leader responsible for decision-making and communication within the team.
In both cases, you’ll need a skilled and experienced CTO to get the best results. A good CTO will make sure your team is designing a stable application, testing it properly, and scaling it to match customer needs and feedback.
