Those of us involved in DevOps have a tendency to see the world with blinders on. It is rather easy to fall into the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” trap. We have used the phrase “shift left” with the attitude that this is the solution to every problem in IT.

Just for clarity, it is not. That is as blunt and unambiguous a statement as I can make. DevOps is great and has helped in many areas, but it is not the only solution, and not every problem is a DevOps toolchain problem.

In the end, much critical work in IT is not DevOps-related, nor can it be impacted by DevOps. I’ll mention two areas that are obvious and talk in-depth about one of them.

First off, no matter how far down the Agile/DevOps trail you travel, the wagon you are riding in is separate and distinct from the DevOps process. If you have a data center, all that hardware is still, in the end, hardware that must be configured and managed. For the “But we’re 100% in the cloud!” crowd (who say that loudly and forcefully enough that I suspect they’re trying to convince themselves that this is a good thing)—in the end, you are still using a network and computers to connect. The massive work-from-home migration due to lockdowns made it abundantly clear that IT is needed to set up and support both. Some of the horror stories coming across ops and DevOps social media were … ugly. Employees don’t want to be—and should not need to be—IT specialists to get their job done.

The other easy one is security. Yes, insert security into development and DevOps workflows. Yes, make operations staff more aware of security. Yes, automate security as much as possible because we’re chronically short of security staff. But, in the end, lots of security is external to DevOps. While Kubernetes security is absolutely DevOps, password management, for example, absolutely is not. And that’s just one of many, many examples.

So I am going to ask (but not answer) the question: Where is the line? How far left is too far? The answer is yours to decide with regard to your organization and the tools/environment that exist in your organization. In a primarily cloud environment, the answer to this question is far different than in a primarily data center environment. It is rare that any organization be purely one or the other at this point in time, so there are similarities, but few exact solutions we can name.

Security is akin to a cost center. It is actually insurance, but few orgs view it that way. And even if they did, it would not make much difference. Much as my father once declared that he and Mom were “insurance poor” and canceled half their policies, most orgs want to contain the costs of security whether they admit it or not. When ‘security merged into DevOps’ hits the ears of people trying to stretch budgets just as far as they can, bad things tend to happen.

DevSecOps implements security where it should have been all along—at the development stage—but it does not replace other security, it just makes our apps more protected. There are cases where security testing hours are seriously reduced, but since testing in all forms is the first thing to go when staffing is tight, again, it is not replacing something that was happening—it is making it possible for us to do what we should have been doing all along.

It doesn’t help that our toolchains have taken on lives of their own—at many organizations, staff are required to maintain them—because they, too, are apps that DevOps struggles to help. Once you’ve invested time and money in building that edifice, you want to use it as much as possible. So, many orgs want to shift left everything in IT, right into the toolchain octopus.

You know your org better than anyone. You are the ones making it work day in and day out, in all of your environment’s glorious complexity. Start talking about what is too much; when adding a step in an already complex toolchain needs to be justified. Push back against everything needing to shift left (where appropriate, I’ll say again for clarity, DevOps has done amazing things for us, but too much of a good thing is our living nightmare and, historically, is tomorrow’s technical debt). Keep rocking it, and make sure you are rocking the right things in the right places.