DevOps obstacles and best practices for overcoming them
Organizations in each industries are embracing DevOps for better productivity and results. But at the same time, a lot of organizations struggle to overcome barriers that prevent them and at last they are not able to ensure proper automation, alignment and competitiveness that may result in improved business process.
DevOps organizations generally start from a common vision — namely that the primary focus of DevOps should be driving business value. But that common vision often leads organizations to ask two questions:
- How do you know if you are driving value?
- How do you measure DevOps success?
A lot of companies aren’t clear on their answer to either. In fact, almost half of respondents confirm they struggle with alignment and linking DevOps practices to business outcomes.
This is a common issue for large organizations which are often plagued with manual processes and organizational silos. Please find the below points that shows the type of those obstacles and best practices for overcoming them.
Culture and Organization Type
Organizations should focus on building a collaborative culture with proper goals. It basically includes finding employees within organization, who are skilled and having in-depth DevOps knowledge.
Complexity of architecture design
Most of the organizations always prefer hybrid cloud because of huge benefits like, improved security, enhanced agility, and capabilities to mitigate risk with workload testing. In fact, some of the legacy companies also have a complex app architecture because of multiple enterprise-level functionalities included in it. The complexity can be fixed by migrating workloads and leveraging microservices and considering application architecture changes based on on-premises, cloud and containers services.
No test automation principle
If you don’t have a proper set of test automation principles in place, it is going to be very tough and a challenging task to ensure that important requirements are fulfilled. So the automation should undergo with continuous testing and establish a set of test automation principles.
Legacy systems
A lot of organizations prefer to keep legacy infrastructure and applications, where you would face challenges in implementing DevOps. Mostly, legacy companies have a resistance to change or modification to the usual technology offerings because their legacy systems and way of working are complex and changing them to set up automation is difficult. So organizations should be agile in nature to accept changes based on client’s requirements.
DevOps plan
Organizations fails due to improper or no DevOps plan. So it is always a good approach to create a detailed plan that includes projects people, responsibilities and their deliverables according to the DevOps plan.
Monitoring
Few organizations do not have the system to monitor the health of the delivery system and infrastructure. It is always recommended that application, database, storage, server and networks should be under constant monitoring, and there are various DevOps tools to monitor resources, configure notifications and provision infrastructure automation and leveraging them which in turn helps organizations to adopt DevOps quickly.
Limited IT Skill
In the era of rapid technology changes, most of the companies have teams with limited knowledge on next generation technologies. It is very much needed to have those people trained on DevOps. Organizations should standardized processes and establish common operational procedures which will help organizations to adopt DevOps smoothly.
Budget limitations
In many organizations, there is a challenge that the budget is limited and also management doesn’t approve due to initial cost involvement for implementing new technology. Sometimes, development and operations team do not want to move out of their own comfort zones and understand problems and give heads up. Management should not step back and stay idle, instead it should facilitate cross-functional working environment by adopting changes and try to allocate budget for that new change.
DevOps is a collaborative way of developing and deploying software. DevOps solutions help organizations to align with goals, rapidly and reliably, by producing high-quality software-based products and services. Therefore, automation is a critical element of DevOps.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on other barriers and the solutions for them. Feel free to leave a comment below.