DevOps has played a crucial role in transforming conventional approaches to software development. Businesses utilize DevOps to ensure faster software delivery with improved quality and better collaboration between development and operations teams. However, the discussions about DevOps challenges don’t come into the limelight, with most of the emphasis being on the benefits of DevOps.
Most of the teams working with the DevOps approach experience many struggles and roadblocks, which can be frustrating at times. Awareness of the prominent challenges for DevOps and their solutions can help a business owner find the best strategic approach for DevOps implementation. This post will help you discover some of the prominent challenges in DevOps and their potential solutions.
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Why does DevOps Face Challenges?
The most common answers to “What is DevOps?” paint it as a combination of software development and IT operations. However, you need to dive a little deeper to understand what DevOps actually entails. DevOps is not about introducing a new department in the organization or bringing a specific set of tools for better results. As a matter of fact, DevOps is a paradigm shift that requires businesses to change how they think about collaboration and communication.
You can notice that success in DevOps initiatives is more about the cultural and philosophical shift rather than the technical aspects. Even with the undeniable benefits of DevOps attracting the eyes of business owners, there is no way to ignore the challenges. Many organizations fail in DevOps implementation due to their inability to recognize the challenges that are not purely technical.
Exploring the Most Prominent DevOps Challenges
The utility of DevOps is clearly evident in the different advantages like faster time to market, easier recovery from incidents, reduced deployment failures, and enhanced efficiency. However, a lack of awareness of the challenges with DevOps can lead businesses to waste resources and end up with substandard results. The following sections will help you learn about the most critical challenges for DevOps implementation.
1. Cultural Resistance and Fragmentation
The most prominent challenge for DevOps is the cultural shift that comes with it. The traditional approach to software development involved development and operations teams working in silos. Both teams had different goals, mindsets, and metrics for the same project, thereby leading to conflict. For instance, developers focus on faster delivery and innovation, while the operations team emphasizes stability above everything.
The fundamental difference between the two teams can create problems in the adoption of the DevOps methodology for new projects. One of the notable problems that arises from differences between the development and operations teams is the ‘us vs. them’ mentality. In addition, professionals in both teams accustomed to traditional workflows will showcase resistance to new tools and practices. Furthermore, the lack of active involvement of leadership also creates difficulties for the cultural shift required in DevOps.
2. Complexity of Tools and Integration Process
Any business that wants to embrace DevOps can capitalize on a wide range of tools for every phase of the software development lifecycle. You can find DevOps tools for almost everything, including CI/CD, security, version control, and monitoring. The assurance of access to so many tools offers the flexibility to choose any tool according to your needs. At the same time, it also creates challenges for DevOps projects as choosing the right tools can be a considerably daunting task. Some businesses end up adopting a lot of tools that don’t align with each other, thereby leading to inefficiencies.
Businesses have to face difficulties in achieving seamless integration between different DevOps tools. On top of it, DevOps teams must learn about a wide range of tools, which calls for investing a lot of time in training. The challenges due to the complexity of tools also focus on the inconsistencies in development, testing and production environments that lead to deployment failures.
3. Lack of Attention to Security
The next prominent challenge for businesses in the adoption of DevOps is the lack of attention to security. Since DevOps aims at ensuring faster software delivery, most of the focus of DevOps solutions is on speed. However, businesses forget about security until the final stages of the software development cycle. Pushing security to the later stages of development as an afterthought is responsible for many challenges in DevOps. One of the most critical outcomes of ignoring security till the last stage of development focuses on compliance issues. Without integrating security practices from the beginning, any DevOps initiative is likely to face regulatory penalties.
The delayed attention to security results in the discovery of bugs and errors in the final stages of development. As a result, businesses have to spend more resources and time fixing such errors. The possibilities of bugs passing undetected through different stages of development can lead to the creation of insecure code. The problems arising from insecure code, such as data loss and breaches, can damage the reputation of an organization.
4. Rigidity of Legacy Systems
Most of the organizations embracing DevOps work with legacy systems and applications in their infrastructure. The adoption of DevOps for businesses with legacy systems is a daunting task, as the old systems were not designed for agile paradigms. You can think of monolithic architectures that involve large and tightly coupled applications, which create difficulties in frequent modification, testing, and deployment.
The automation-first principle in DevOps is not applicable in legacy processes that rely heavily on manual configuration and deployment. Businesses have to go through nightmares to discover the complex dependencies in legacy systems during transformation efforts. At the same time, businesses must also remember that older systems have more security vulnerabilities, making it difficult to integrate them in a DevOps pipeline.
Discovering the Ideal Solutions to DevOps Challenges
The insights on challenges for DevOps reveal that adopting a unified approach to development and IT operations is not easy. However, businesses can overcome these challenges by following a holistic approach to address the limitations of people, processes, and technology. The following sections offer an overview of some of the proven solutions to the challenges of DevOps implementation.
1. Culture of Collaborating and Sharing Responsibility
The foremost addition among the biggest DevOps trends points to efforts to break down silos and establish cross-functional teams. DevOps initiatives require shared goals around desired business objectives rather than focusing on KPIs of individual departments. Business owners must foster open communication and transparency between teams to create new paths for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Most important of all, leaders must showcase active participation in the projects and communicate with team members. When all team members share the same goals and responsibilities, the chances of cultural resistance and conflicts are reduced by a huge margin.
2. Adoption of Standardized Combination of Tools
The large assortment of tools for DevOps is obviously one of the most complex challenges for business owners. However, the solution suggests that adopting a standard set of tools with a thoughtful approach can prevent confusion. For instance, businesses must identify the critical areas for automation while choosing DevOps services and select tools that perform the best in the concerned areas. Most important of all, businesses must choose tools that facilitate easier integration with existing systems. Platforms such as Azure DevOps or GitLab can be the best picks for DevOps with their integrated version control, project management, and CI/CD capabilities.
3. Security from Early Stages
Another proven solution to a formidable DevOps challenge is the adoption of security as a shared responsibility in all stages of the development cycle. Integration of security practices and tools in the early stages of development can involve scanning the source code during development and testing applications to identify vulnerabilities in the running state. DevOps teams should also use techniques like software composition analysis to recognize and resolve open-source vulnerabilities. The other proven solutions to embrace security in the early stages include automated security checks for CI/CD pipelines and security training.
Final Thoughts
The overview of the notable DevOps challenges and the solutions recommended for them showcases that embracing DevOps is not easy. On the other hand, a holistic and strategic approach to fighting against the challenges can help businesses embrace DevOps easily. The right DevOps strategy will not only ensure faster time to market but also achieve new benchmarks of competitive advantage.
We at Mindpath have been serving our clients with end-to-end IT solutions, including DevOps services tailored to their needs and vision. Our experts have the experience required to understand the client’s vision and offer relevant solutions. Talk to our DevOps consultants and discover the ideal way to make the most of DevOps benefits now.
