Why DevOps Efforts Fail
[This article was originally published on SDTimes as a contributed article.]
The main goal of DevOps is simple: ship software updates frequently, reliably, and with better quality. This goal is somewhat 'motherhood and apple pie', and every organization will agree that they want to get there. Many will tell you they've already embarked on the DevOps journey by following some commonly followed frameworks, such as CALMS.
However, very few will express satisfaction with the results. After speaking to 200+ DevOps professionals at various stages of the adoption lifecycle, we found that organizations generally fall in one of 3 categories:
We were most interested in groups 2 and 3 since they were actually in the middle of their DevOps journey. When asked to better explain the challenges and roadblocks, here is what we found:
- 68% said the lack of connectivity between the various DevOps tools in their toolchain was a very frustrating aspect.
- 52% said a large portion of their testing was still manual, slowing them down
- 38% had a mix of legacy and modern applications, i.e. brownfield environments. This created complexity in terms of deployment strategies and endpoints, toolchain, etc.
- 27% were still struggling with silo'ed teams that could not collaborate as expected
- 23% had limited access to self-service infrastructure.
- Other notable pain points included finding the right DevOps skillset, difficulty managing the complexity of multiple services and environments, lack of urgency/budget, and limited support from executive leadership.
Let us look at each of these challenges in greater detail.