The engine behind enterprise software excellence today is DevOps. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units: Development and Operations.
DevOps as a service not only helps to automate redundant tasks and the entire delivery pipeline but also orchestrate the overall infrastructure in a better way.
The common obstacles faced by any company in implementing DevOps include:
- Office culture and teams resisting change
Developers are often too invested in their own skillset, tools, and their own personal methods of doing their job. It is all too common that employees are resistant to changes in job roles, responsibilities, and are scared of what changes the future might bring. Software development, testing and operations have traditionally been three separate teams, working in silos without much communication except for what is absolutely necessary.
DevOps brings in a different ideology. There is no distinction between a developer, a tester or an operations person. The engineer who writes the code, is responsible for its execution and deployment.
Effective communication and collaboration need to be set in place for all teams. Understanding and empathy on both sides towards different work roles will help the office adapt to changes faster and smoother.
- Hasty and Wrongful implementation of Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Hasty implementation of continuous delivery pipeline that doesn’t support the entire application stack of the company. It’s important to take a take a step back and take a snapshot of all your development pipelines. Then the focus should be on building or deploying a platform that supports how your development teams code. Your proposed pipeline shouldn’t require your developers to change the way they code.
Pipelines are also sometimes developed independently by third-party contractors which aren’t always in accordance with what the enterprise demands. As a result, pipelines created often fall short of the requirements of the organization and thus, hampers the growth opportunities of the enterprise. Developing a set of regular templates for your pipelines enables you to do more effective reporting and also lets you compare the effectiveness of your pipelines, which in turn improves continuous feedback and delivery.
- Focusing too intently on tech tools and not inter-team dynamics
Often a company focuses on too many modern tech tools like Chef, Puppet or Jenkins to upscale and expedite production of their software. It’s essential the software tools we employ are open and can be integrated into one another, to enable fast and iterative usage.
Instead of just focusing on using modern tech, the emphasis should be on making sure development and operations team interact with each other, and provide services and share information between them.
Tools are merely accelerators of work. You need to have proper direction and context beforehand to know how to use them effectively.
- Monitoring of the health of delivery pipeline becomes challenging
Many companies do not have the necessary tooling skill-sets or the expertise to monitor the health of the delivery pipeline and infrastructure. Applications, databases, and servers need constant monitoring, and most companies feel that DevOps will only add to the complexity and make it even harder.
However, there are plenty of DevOps tools which can be used to monitor resources, set up alerts and implement infrastructure automation. Using these tools is absolutely essential to implementing DevOps quickly and smoothly with as few hiccups as possible.
- Added Complexity of Architecture:
Some legacy companies have a very complex app architecture, because of multiple enterprise-level functionalities included in it.
Companies with a complex architecture a hybrid environment most often feel that adopting DevOps would be a very painful exercise. It is believed that automation without manual intervention might not work. This is primarily because these applications are developed and tested in isolated environments because of the hybrid design. This makes the deployment and release of each separate component sluggish which makes automation even harder.
It is extremely important to ensure an optimum implementation of any digital transformation tool. There is no contention to the fact that a DevOps implementation has its advantages. A faster go-to market with new offerings and solutions can be the difference between a big quarter and a slow one. If you are considering moving towards a DevOps approach, our team of DevOps consultants would be happy to help!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MADHAVAN SRINIVASAN
Managing Director – Products and Solutions