DevOps Experience: Challenges and the Bright Side

Organizations have always been keen on reducing the time required to develop systems and processes that improve the quality and consistency of their deliveries. This objective is the primary driving force behind the increased emphasis on merging the best of software development and IT operations – DevOps. Improved deployment frequency, reduced time-to-market, lower failure rate and lead time, shorter recovery time, and similar business goals are at the core of most DevOps operations all over the world.

As DevOps is gradually becoming mainstream, uncertainties and doubt regarding this new approach to platform design, automation, and organizational culture echo from all quarters of the business landscape. The question remains whether DevOps can deliver what it promises. There is a significant disconnect between organizations’ expectations from DevOps and what it actually in its purview. The concern is reasonable given that many I&O leaders face roadblocks in implementing or scaling their DevOps practice.

According to Gartner, as much as three-fourth of all DevOps initiatives will fall short of expectations and the primary reason for it would be lack of organizational learning and adaptability.

Challenges with DevOps

Most organizations launch their DevOps initiative without adequate consideration of the business outcome they want to achieve. For such a new practice to be implemented, I&O leaders must acquaint their staff and customers with DevOps before getting it on board. The Gartner 2017 Enterprise DevOps Survey found that 88% of respondents consider team culture one of the top people-related factors that impact the scalability of DevOps in an organization. Surprisingly, it also found that organizations ignore the significance of organically preparing their workforce for the imminent change and rather focus on leveraging the tools for DevOps success.

Identifying every stakeholder in a proposed DevOps practice and ensuring seamless collaboration between them is another hurdle in the path of its implementation. Organizations fail to improve the time-to-value due to the lack of coordination between the concerned groups. Besides, DevOps has been mostly confined to I&O. It is crucial to understand that DevOps cannot be implemented enterprise-wide at once. There are far too many variables involved in it to implement in a single step in a large organization.

Best Practices for DevOps Success

“Doing DevOps for the sake of doing DevOps,” wherein the focus is more on the tools and methods than business requirements and customer needs, is bound to lead to a failed implementation. Launching a DevOps initiative without establishing the business reason for it is an all-too-common mistake organizations commit. DevOps is a business-centric approach that leverages agile methodology, collaboration, and automation to deliver solutions. Hence, defining the target state appropriately for every stakeholder in your organization is crucial.

DevOps must be implemented iteratively, and each increment should be characterized by three attributes – friendly environment, acceptable values, and acceptable risks. Since people are the most crucial component of any DevOps initiative, prioritizing behavior over skills is important. Note that it is easier to train people on the required technical skills than to instill in them the required spirit.

The objectives of a DevOps initiative must be defined at the team level and mapped to the business objective of each team. However, a sense of collective achievement must be inculcated so that every team works towards the ultimate goal of the organization. Incentives and performance metrics could be the tools of motivation in this regard.

The overall DevOps implementation comprises an integration tool chain for the evaluation and selection of such tools that can be coupled with the adjacent tool in the application life cycle. Interlinked automation touch points and information flows expedite releases through the tool chain and reduce errors, defects, rework, and outages.

Timing the progress, and scaling only when you’re ready is the key to successful DevOps deployment. Get your team together and start moving in the chosen direction and address the hurdles as they come along.

The LTTS Differentiator

Effective DevOps implementation calls for both expertise in enterprise technologies and in-depth business understanding across industries. LTTS is one of the few players in the world possessing end-to-end capability in DevOps implementation. From initial assessment and feasibility report to continuous improvement and establishing centralized governance for scalability, LTTS has been a preferred IT partner for a number of big and small organizations.

The CI-CD pipeline for embedded systems is one of our successful projects that underline our differentiating capabilities in DevOps deployment. We set up a Continuous Integration and Build Automation pipeline to reduce the build and deployment time, improve the quality and consistency of the code, and increase project visibility. The Continuous Integration and Auto build pipeline detected coding and compilation issues early in the development cycle while the build metrics and code coverage metrics fixed the identified issues. With seamless automation at every stage, all of that was done with little manual intervention.

Future Expectations

As cloud, automation, and ‘open source’ mature, DevOps is unlikely to meet a crisis on the technology front. The hurdles – both current and in the foreseeable future – lie in building an organizational culture that is conducive to this new practice. Those organizations that will concentrate their effort on behavioral change more than the tools will succeed in smoothly transitioning to DevOps. This is true for both the workforce and the leadership, which tends to believe, quite contrary to the reality, that DevOps requires an overhaul of the entire infrastructure and framework. With the global DevOps market projected to exceed $12 billion by 2025, what is certain is that the practice already has its takers and there are technology partners to facilitate as well.