After working with 6+ startups and setting up their DevOps workflow I have learnt what makes it difficult for companies to adopt DevOps methodology.
Here are the top 10 challenges that make adopting DevOps difficult:
1. Changing the company's culture for the better:
DevOps is all about faster release cycles. The only way it would work is if we encourage cross-team collaboration. Developers, Software architects, DevOps, SRE, product, marketing & customer success all should be coming together.
2. Getting Everyone On Board:
It's a big shift. For it to succeed everyone needs to be on board, including executives, IT, business managers and everyone involved in development and operations to identify and use the right tools.
3. Optimising deployment pipeline:
CI/CD is the cornerstone of DevOps. It minimises both time and cost of moving a feature from development to production. The faster you deploy features, the more value. The challenge is to enforce company policies and development standards.
4. Securing the infrastructure:
Security must be introduced at the beginning of the deployment cycle, resulting in safer deployments without sacrificing speed.
5. Sharing Knowledge:
Knowledge silos are the big problems. DevOps can make it worse. Process change, new tools, and services deploying to a different platform. Without good docs and a knowledge base, collaboration with other teams quickly becomes a nightmare.
6. Managing multiple environments:
DevOps need to manage multiple environments - dev, sandbox, prod etc. Without a plan in place, managing these environments can quickly get out of hand.
7. Transitioning from expert teams to cross-functional teams:
Nothing kills DevOps initiative faster than a siloed team. It thrives on cross-team collaboration and communication.
8. Cost of DevOps:
It doesn't reduce cost as much as it increases revenue. Faster release cycles lead to greater value added to your product, resulting in revenue gains.
DevOps tend to have higher initial costs. It's easy to get discouraged if benefits are not immediate.
9. Innovate faster and reduce risks:
Shorter release cycles mean less time to build, test, and deploy changes. Having a manual process in the pipeline will always delay the release cycle. If you need to move quickly and ensure quality, the best solution is automation.
10. Adoption is bottom-up:
Developers already know what they need to get the job done. So let them decide on tools and platforms. Trust DevOps teams to build the environments and leave the managing to management.
I hope the thread is helpful for you to succeed as a DevOps engineer in your current and future jobs. Addressing these at the start always helps to set the correct expectations among the stakeholders.
Thanks for reading this.
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