Top 4 Challenges in DevOps Adoption
With 2023 now behind us, we're not just a year older, but also a year wiser. Stepping into 2024, all of us at Facets.cloud warmly wish each of you a prosperous and successful year ahead.
Welcome to another edition of "Shift Left, Ship Right!" — our dedicated space for all things DevOps.
This time, we're brewing something interesting. Moving away from our usual style, we'll exclusively talk about the challenges organizations face while implementing DevOps.
Let us know what you think?of this new format once you've finished reading ??
The world of DevOps can be hard to navigate. Identifying systematic problems can be tough, and often, their detrimental impact on software delivery isn't felt until it's too late.?
After engaging with over 200 organizations, we've found that only a few have successfully streamlined their DevOps processes, and the challenges they face in implementation are widespread. Usually, the top challenges turn out to be:
We've observed these challenges are so frequent that recurring patterns have emerged. But, can these patterns be substantiated with industry research? We dig deep in this edition of “Shift Left, Ship Right!”?
Let’s get started!
P.S. This newsletter has a little meme magic sprinkled in. We hope it brings a smile to your face while you learn something new ??
P.P.S. Did you know that Facets has its own Developer community on Slack? What's even better is that it's accompanied by 'Facets AI', providing a quick and accurate way to get answers to all things Facets. Come aboard and begin contributing to the growth of Platform Engineering.
Challenge #1: Impact on Developer Productivity
According to a report by Haystack, 74% of developers are involved in Operations to some extent. This means only 26% focus exclusively on product development.
NOT surprising! Speed matters while deploying new features. The emphasis on rapid feature shipment leads to frequent handoffs between developers and operations teams. To minimize these handoffs, automations are written.?
However, creating automations is full of complexities and requires close collaboration between the Ops and Dev teams, who must use a variety of tools.?
Given the high value of developers, particularly in industries where staffing costs are a major concern, any decrease in efficiency can lead to significant organizational costs. We argue that developers' time would be better spent on innovations rather than on these operational tasks.
In organizations where DevOps practices are not fully implemented or a cultural shift-left is absent, inefficiencies become common. This is because of the ever-increasing cognitive load on Operations teams, always trying to keep up to new technological trends.
Which brings us to the next challenge. Skill gap.
Organizations face the challenge of finding talent that not only has an eye for detail but also possesses the skills necessary to reduce toil.
Challenge #2: DevOps Skills Shortage
The DevOps market has continued to grow at an astonishing rate, from $8.88 billion in 2022 to $10.84 billion in 2023. By 2030, it is projected to reach $57.9 billion. And as a result, job opportunities will continue to increase too.
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As of 2nd January, 2024 (the day we took the screen shot), with more than 100,000 new job listings for DevOps professionals on LinkedIn, their high demand is quite evident.
But, the question is whether there are enough individuals with the required DevOps skills. Unfortunately, the answer is NO. Only a small number possess the necessary expertise to create an immediate impact.
In the DevOps Institute's Upskilling IT 2023 Report, similar challenges are highlighted. As many as 31% of IT leaders identified ‘lack of skills’ as the biggest challenge being faced by their organizations.
The report states, “Around the world, IT organizations are finding that they are not achieving their full potential because of the skill gap. Such gaps impact the ability to meet customer expectations, reduce the quality of products and services, delay time to market, and allow competitors to gain market share.”
This trend aligns with findings from a 2021 Puppet report (yes, the landscape hasn't changed much), which indicates that a "shortage of skills" is the primary factor, at 33%, contributing to organizations' struggles with DevOps challenges.
Indeed, not an ideal situation!
Challenge #3: Infra Management & Environmental Inconsistencies
According to CSA, the primary causes of misconfigurations in infrastructure are lack of internal guidance (33%), non-secure default settings (18%), and negligence (16%).
The consequences of poorly managed drifts can be far-reaching — ranging from engineers' growing frustration due to delayed deployments to significant unplanned downtimes. An effective resolution to infrastructural and environmental inconsistencies requires intervention from the senior leadership to establish best practices and adhere to the mantra of "build fast and ship even faster".
By embracing the Single Source of Truth (SSOT) as a core tenet of infrastructure management, organizations can build a robust foundation for a drift-free and stable cloud-native environment.
Rohit Raveendran , Co-founder at Facets.cloud, has written extensively about this in this blog post titled, “From Chaos to Consistency: A Comprehensive Approach to Maintaining a Drift-Free Infrastructure”. (Link to blog) Do give it a read.
This approach will enable quicker issue identification, leading to faster code deployments and reduced time to go live with updates.
Challenge #4: Unoptimized or Wasteful Cloud Spend
According to Gartner, IT spending on public cloud computing is expected to surpass 51% by 2025. Yes, that’s more than half of IT budgets allocated solely to cloud services. This raises a crucial question: how much of your cloud expenditure is truly efficient??
A Forbes article highlighted that in 2021, over 30% of cloud spending was either wasted or not used effectively.
When cloud cost alerts go off, the usual response is to form specialized, centralized teams or "war rooms". These teams check cost reports, identify the departments that are overspending, and direct them to reduce expenses.
These war rooms often only address surface-level issues, neglecting to unearth the root causes. A shift in perspective is needed for long-term solutions.
Instead of just putting out fires, why not prevent them in the first place??
A more sustainable approach to managing cloud costs is to focus on building an efficient system from the ground up. This isn’t about quick fixes; it’s about laying a strong foundation that prevents issues down the road.
Today platform engineering presents an opportunity for the creators to help you do exactly that. Think of it as designing your new toolkit for smarter, more efficient cloud management.
This blog post by Pravanjan Choudhury , Co-founder at Facets, offers a good amount of insights into effective cloud cost management strategies. It's highly recommended for anyone seeking to optimize their cloud expenditures.
Excited to dive into your insights on the top DevOps challenges! Looking forward to gaining valuable perspectives to guide our approach in 2024.