10 Obstacles to the Adoption of Devops and How to Overcome Them

Numerous software and IT Operations teams have incorporated DevOps concepts into their work cultures to become more agile and inventive.

Companies that still need to adopt DevOps principles face competitive pressure. Initially, progress is fraught with obstacles, but it pays off if you maintain your path.

This article examines the 10 most significant obstacles firms encounter when attempting to embrace DevOps.

Defeat The Developer Versus Operations Attitude

In many organizations, developers hurl code over an imaginary wall to a centralized operations team. Developers are attempting to innovate and make changes as rapidly as possible, while the operations team is trying to maintain high service levels.

The interests of these two groups sometimes contradict one another, resulting in friction spots, more extraordinary expenses, and lengthier feedback loops.

DevOps is all about connecting teams and eliminating silos in IT organizations. This journey starts with formulating a strategy for how this will work for your organization.

Understanding the roles and responsibilities of where dev presently ends and operations currently begin, as well as how these might be effectively integrated, is a beautiful beginning place for any firm and is often the first obstacle that must be overcome when adopting DevOps principles.

A Shared Understanding of Continuous Delivery Methods

Once you've determined that your code must be continuously delivered to reduce feedback loops, and your engineers have implemented pipelines and CI tooling to enable this, you must ask whether your feature teams genuinely comprehend what it means to continuously deliver your software into your environments at a higher frequency.

The majority of organizations will have their definition of Continuous Delivery. Continuous delivery is a collection of techniques that enables you to safely and sustainably release new software updates of all sorts (new features, bug repairs, etc.) by guaranteeing that your developers' modifications never disrupt the main project, hence keeping it in a condition that is always deployable.

Before deploying to a production environment, the procedure enables you to confirm that the whole project is in a clean, operable condition.

Providing a clear definition of Continuous Delivery for your organization helps build a shared understanding of what it means to give constantly and how to attain stability.

Transitioning From Old Architecture and Infrastructure to Microservices

Even if they have served the organization well for years, aging infrastructure and applications with complicated architectural stacks might provide problems.

Maintaining the status quo often results in instability issues, a lack of support, and expensive operating expenses, all of which result in falling behind the competitors.

Using infrastructure-as-code in conjunction with a microservices architecture is a significant step toward a future of continuous innovation. It directly re-invents and modernizes the entire software development lifecycle, enabling the business to adapt to shifting markets and customer preferences quickly.

Moving toward a cloud-native ecosystem with microservices design may unlock the floodgates to speedier development and innovation. In addition, a robust foundation in automation, configuration management, and continuous delivery methods is required to accommodate the extra operational demand that microservices bring.

Implementing A Plan for Test Automation

Your organization already knows that automated tests are vital to DevOps methods, especially CI/CD, and are a critical enabler. So what is preventing the acceleration of test automation?

In addition to describing the test approach, it is necessary to provide teams with examples of its application as a compass.

This incorporates BDD methods and the three-amigos strategy, as well as resolving critical concerns such as "How do we handle test data?"

Can we use shared libraries and standard techniques that are open source?

What does a decent end-to-end test for our code base look like?

What should the purpose of our smoke tests be?

Having a clear grasp of how to apply the test strategy may go a long way in promoting the adoption of test automation throughout the whole organization, reducing feedback loops, and expediting the release of your products!

Excessive Emphasis on Tools

With the enticing potential of embracing DevOps, bright new solutions on the market may seem to address every possible issue.

With the introduction of new tools, however, comes the need to teach your employees how to use them, ensuring that they fulfill security standards and are well-integrated with the current infrastructure.

All of this might distract you from your primary objective, your team.

Your team and organizational structure are essential to DevOps. Once the necessary structure is in place, the team's procedures will follow. And after the procedures are specified, you can decide which technologies are required to satisfy them.

When shifting to DevOps, the most crucial component is the team members. If they are taught the newly installed procedures and technologies, clarity will ensue, and the adoption of DevOps methods will be slowed.

Team Responsibility for Deployments and Releases

In organizations where DevOps methods are applied, teams still need complete control over their software deployment and release cycles.

This is often the result of a misunderstanding of the distinction between deploying and releasing.

Deployment is installing your program into any environment, including dev, test, and prod.

Releasing the product one step further means making it accessible to the final user. This is essential for successfully implementing the "you create, you operate it" cross-functional team approach.

The best approach is for the team to begin working closely with any ops personnel and to assume joint responsibility for deployments, releases, and operations so that the two groups have a common context. This helps developers, for example, to understand what it takes to deploy and release their code into production.

Having this context may assist the whole team embrace DevOps principles and allow the team to begin taking responsibility for not just deployments but also releases!

Opposition To Change

Some team members and essential stakeholders may find the transition to DevOps daunting. This difficulty may be mitigated by framing it as an evolution of existing development processes rather than a revolution.

Advising that a person must change might be seen as a negative reflection on the person getting the advice. It should be emphasized that a DevOps transition takes time; it must be progressive and fluid. This helps everyone to embrace the DevOps culture as they gradually adapt to it and see the many ways in which they may contribute to the development process.

Finding a tiny product or full-stack slice of an existing application to implement DevOps methods is an effective strategy.

Once teams witness the advantages of working in action, other groups will naturally embrace the new methods of working. This will gradually reduce the unfamiliarity and get everyone on board with entering the new DevOps environment.

Key Metrics Are Implemented.

It is difficult to argue against statistics and data, which is why many organizations have begun collecting various metrics. However, sometimes organizations need more information!

It might be simple to get entangled in analytics and dashboards. While these endeavors might be undertaken with enthusiasm, collecting primary data can soon become time-consuming and laborious.

It is crucial to remember why metrics are collected: so that they may be acted upon. The goal is to make changes so that the metrics improve.

One method is to gather just the DORA data and make them accessible to teams, along with agreed-upon (and achievable!) actions for improving these metrics for each group. This robust and targeted strategy may allow these teams to begin adopting engineering techniques, ultimately aiding in delivering and integrating DevOps culture inside the organization.

Dev And Ops Toolsets Are Incompatible.

It may also be problematic when the dev and operational teams use entirely different toolsets and analytics. As easy as it may seem, it is advantageous to sit both groups together and determine where it makes sense to combine their systems and harmonize the data they track.

Some teams may be reluctant to abandon outdated tools that are not only technologically inferior but also slow down the infrastructure owing to compatibility difficulties. Ensure that the adopted tools are linked with the company's objectives and stay within your primary purpose.

Initially, overcoming these fundamental obstacles will make the transition to DevOps considerably simpler. Every team member will get used to the experience of perpetual change and innovation over time.

Once the development, operations, and other teams have learned to work together, they will identify methods to assist and collaborate more closely.

Getting Started with Ongoing Education

Curiosity may be a powerful incentive for many individuals to begin studying! Curiosity to continually learn, adapt, and develop their skills and knowledge is one of the most crucial enabling factors for the team to start adopting a DevOps mentality.

One approach is ensuring that teams have access to a platform that facilitates learning and sharing. This may be accomplished via communities of practices, where the organization invests in a monthly day of learning and knowledge sharing, lunch and learn events or the adoption of guilds across teams.

When new technologies or products are introduced, the notion of dojos may assist coaches in establishing a classroom atmosphere for students to learn and upskill on critical organizational changes, emphasizing hands-on, practical learning.

Similarly, a train-the-trainer methodology may be developed to guarantee that organizational practices are disseminated throughout all teams, regardless of their size. Irrespective of the technique you pick, a culture of continuous learning may be the initial tiny step that leads to a significant leap in implementing DevOps principles.a

Conclusion

These are all difficulties in the corporate DevOps adoption process. Numerous levers can be pulled to guarantee that new methods of working and a DevOps Consultants mentality are embraced, whether from the top down or the bottom up.

Ultimately, solving these DevOps difficulties would enable the organization to preserve its agility and expedite the delivery of business value to end consumers, hence facilitating faster feedback loops.