DevOps: Challenges?

When some new technology comes, new architecture style comes or some new paradigm comes across there are some early adapters (small), some onlookers (medium) and some wait watch (enterprises) companies. The same is true in case of DevOps which is more like a end-end architecture style from requirements phase to deployment phase than a programming language, it is more like SOA that defines best practices. There is a fundamental assumption that it would reduce costs and increase quality which makes it interesting for all.What actually is needed for someone to adapt Devops? When is a company ready for DevOps?

DevOps involves changes in 3 planes: People, Process and tools.

People: there is some cultural shifts that need to happen amongst the dev and ops teams for DevOps to be successful. There is a trust deficiency between them which needs to be bridged. They have been working in silos for years, there are china walls built between them which needs to be broken. This requires more team bonding between them, involve them in each others's area: in dev and ops and start sharing all artifacts and build common repository for all their deliverables.

Process: The business which has been harping for this change for years needs to work on the requirements phase more diligently, write small stories that can be built fast and committed fast, tie the business risk to business requirements so the releases can be prioritized and effort well spent. Also, now the SDLC process requires the involvement of ops in it and SDLC encompasses product life cycle and not project life cycle. The systems, people and tools to be tuned for continuous delivery, continuous integration and continuous testing and continuous deployment.

Tools: we are looking for tools for version control that can adapt to very high volumes for changes, automated build cycles, automated static code analysis, unit testing and performance testing, integration and configuration management and deployment. There are plenty of tools for these functions and it becomes quite an exercise to select what suits the best for you.

Then what are the challenges:

People: Getting people with DevOps skills is the #1 challenge any company faces like many other new technologies on the block. There are so many tools for each of the DevOps functions and folks that tie all together is a challenge.

Test Environment identical to Prod environment is the #2 challenge. Generally we have problems because production environment and test environment are not the same. Developers and testers test in some small environment which is much scaled down version of the prod environment. So when we put in production they work OK for small loads but perform poorly with large loads. For small companies that involve clusters of 10 or 20 nodes for testing it is OK but for large enterprises that have 100's of servers is a big investment to build a identical prod environment. some e-commerce companies are making those investments but others are still not there.

OK to fail? Many in the industry are not used to the change in attitude of it is OK to fail or fail early slogan of DevOps. The teams are used to putting all the measures in place so failure is prevented at all costs as failure means big losses in revenue. DevOps preaches fail fast or fail early. Puts more onus on speed than precision and it is OK to release a patch for the failure quickly. This attitude shift takes some time to synch in the teams.

Companies need to start on this DevOps journey like they did for SOA and it requires lot of rationalization, transformation and optimization along the way.