We've all read the books, followed the gurus, and tried to tick every box in the DevOps checklist.. but let’s be honest:
There's always that one best practice that just doesn’t work for your team, your stack, or your sanity.
Maybe you don't write as many tests as you should.
Maybe you still SSH into production (👀).
Maybe you use latest tags on your Docker images and pray.
No judgment here, just real talk from the trenches.
What's your "ignored" DevOps best practice, and why do you skip it?
Bonus points if you share how it's actually worked out for you.
🛠️ Posted by the team behind DevOps Daily
Top comments (1)
🔥 "Best Practice" I Secretly Ignore: Writing Everything as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
Why I ignore it (sometimes):
While IaC (like using Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation) is a foundational DevOps principle, I occasionally bypass full IaC for small, low-impact changes — like tweaking an IAM policy or spinning up a temporary test environment.
😅 Here’s the Truth:
Writing everything in IaC slows down rapid experimentation for one-off tasks.
For small-scale, non-critical resources, clicking around in the cloud console (or using a quick CLI command) gets the job done faster.
I still document it and clean it up — but I don’t always codify it immediately.
🧠 Why It’s (Sometimes) Okay:
Speed vs Maintainability: Not everything deserves the overhead of full versioning and reviews.
Learning & Exploration: Especially in R&D, prototyping in the console helps test ideas quickly.
Cost Awareness: Temporary resources often get deleted quickly, so they don’t live long enough to justify IaC.
✅ What I Don’t Ignore:
All production infrastructure is managed as code.
I still log and document every non-IaC change for transparency.
Temporary manual resources are tagged and time-bound to prevent "zombie" costs.
🧩 The Balance:
DevOps isn’t about blindly following every rule — it’s about automation where it matters, and efficiency where it counts.