DevOps is supposed to make teams faster. But the wrong practices can make things slower, more fragile, and more stressful. Here are the five issues we see most consistently when we start working with a new team.
1. Long-lived feature branches
Branches that live for weeks accumulate massive merge conflicts and make continuous integration pointless. Fix: trunk-based development with feature flags. Merge small changes daily. Use flags to hide incomplete features in production.
2. Secrets in code or environment files
API keys, database passwords, and tokens checked into git — even accidentally — are a serious security risk and a breach waiting to happen. Fix: use a secrets manager (AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, or even GitHub Actions secrets). Scan your repo history with git-secrets or truffleHog.
3. No staging environment
Testing directly in production because “staging is always out of date.” This causes avoidable outages and makes engineers afraid to deploy. Fix: automate staging deployments in your CI pipeline so staging is always a mirror of main.
4. Manual deployments
Deployments that require an engineer to SSH into a server and run commands by hand are slow, error-prone, and impossible to audit. Fix: any deployment that happens more than twice should be automated. Full stop.
5. Ignoring observability until something breaks
You can not improve what you can not see. Teams without dashboards for latency, error rates, and saturation are flying blind. Fix: add the four golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) to every service. Start simple — even a basic Grafana dashboard over Prometheus is transformative.
Recognise any of these? EkamOps does free 30-minute DevOps health checks — we will tell you exactly where to focus first.