Development and Operations, commonly known as DevOps, is designed for effective collaboration between teams and to eliminate silos, allowing compact integration of tools for valued process mapping. These features of DevOps have made it popular in many organizations, but implementing the DevOps process is challenging for even the best of organizations. The primary reason for this is the various tools and processes within DevOps that make it confusing to choose the right tool for an organization and taking DevOps Foundation certification training can help you clear this confusion. Automation and integration are also a critical part of DevOps implementation.
DevOps Implementation Challenges & Solutions
DevOps has gained immense popularity but a lack of awareness, knowledge, and governance when it comes to implementing the application gives rise to some major DevOps challenges. Below are some common DevOps implementation challenges that are faced by many organizations and solutions for them.
Security & Access Management
One of the top challenges faced during DevOps implementation is around security and access management. This is because most cloud solutions are deployed with security as an afterthought, resulting in companies being vulnerable in certain areas. This impacts not just the DevOps implementation, but also the company overall.
Solution: To ensure security in your cloud solutions and DevOps implementation you should involve the security in the deployment process from the beginning. This helps them identify the features of DevOps and access management solutions. Training your security team on a Control Objective Baseline for IT Standards (COBIT) and Cloud Security Alliance perspective is also helpful in ensuring security compliance in DevOps implementation.
Business Monitoring & Metrics
Many top performers face quality issues that stem from latency in the system. These are common in organizations with multiple business lines in various regions. DevOps needs to be set up to not only monitor if the system is up or down but also if it is actually working.
Solution: Define metrics for services as well as systems and team members involved in the DevOps process. Building a proactive monitoring process for the three primary aspects of DevOps, Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Improvement will ensure an easy transition to changes.
Scaling Development & Testing
When deploying DevOps, it’s easy to overlook the scalability of various units, including interdependency and automated testing. If not done right, the entire system will start to break down.
Solution: Individual interdependency should be used only minimally in the individual codebase and test cases. Also, avoid writing test cases in a way that makes them dependent on the outcome of other tests. You can use temporary tests for parallel testing of features.
Tool Issues
DevOps offers numerous tools, and these should be applied based on the organization’s requirements. Many companies become too dependent on the tools, and if the team members are not adequately trained on the use of these tools, it could lead to confusion. Using SaaS-based tools are easy to adopt and don’t require any authorization, which may prove to be harmful to the organization’s health.
Solution: The DevOps teams should be given a specific library of tools from where they can select the tools they prefer. Team leads and company management can also track team activities easily if only a set number of tools are used. The most common tools used by top companies include Jenkins, used by 21% of corporations; Docker, used by 16%; Puppet, used by 14%; and Chef, used by 13%.
Not combining Silos
DevOps is designed to bring together all the silos and sectors in the company. Many companies fail to realize this and break down silos, creating obstacles in DevOps implementation. Doing so requires making major changes, like restructuring the staff, which can be difficult.
Solution: Assigning a DevOps administrator who can act as a mediator between departments, helping communicate and apply DevOps processes across teams. This also facilitates cross-team collaboration.
Process-based Challenges
When an organization has set processes that are followed blindly, adopting DevOps might require major changes due to the lack of a fixed framework in DevOps. There is no central DevOps team that oversees operations and decides the tools and processes that should be used; the teams need to make this call themselves.
Solution: Training teams to decide their own course of action without a structured approach gives the power and leadership in the hands of the team, thus enabling them to make better decisions. It is a slow process, but such a system gives employees scope for innovation and responsibility.
To Conclude
Most companies face challenges when migrating their process to DevOps since adopting any new process requires a certain level of changes and restructuring. Following the above solutions can help you overcome the common DevOps adoption challenges and a DevOps Foundation training expert can help you handle most of the challenges. Once implemented, DevOps has a lot of advantages for your organization, which have made it so popular among major companies.
