Every IT enterprise wants to optimize software delivery and improve the end-user experience. Favorably, DevOps is seen by enterprises as the key to these goals, and understandably so.
After all:
- The organizations with a DevOps culture have experienced deployment 46x faster.
- The teams have had to spend 50 percent less time redressing security concerns.
- The time to restore services has been 2,604 times faster than competitors.
Indeed, these numbers speak highly in favor of DevOps adoption; however, there’s a flip side to this. As it stands, most DevOps adoption attempts fail. As per Gartner, over 75% of DevOps initiatives will not realize their potential business value by the end of this year.
Without the right approach and effective implementation, DevOps could result in a large amount of wasted time, effort, and money. But before decoding the reason behind the failure of DevOps, let us understand what it entails.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of people, processes, and technology that helps deliver high-quality software. It assists businesses in integrating the business operations and software development processes while ensuring interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. Essentially, it’s a change of mindset to adopt agile practices and create an improved organizational culture.
But despite understanding the granularities of DevOps, even leading organizations, at times, fail to get the DevOps implementation right. To that end, gaining an early understanding of the reasons for failure can help businesses identify problems and get back on track quickly.
Decoding Top Reasons for DevOps Failure
- Resistance to Change
Adopting DevOps culture entails a major transition from legacy tools, processes, and methods to new DevOps practices. When team members are accustomed to working in a certain manner, they may resist deviating from their preferred approach.
To shift to a DevOps culture successfully, it is crucial to train the employees to understand the DevOps principles, benefits, and how it can improve the quality. In essence, a welcoming approach from the development team and business stakeholders is crucial for a successful DevOps adoption.
- A Switch from Monolithic to Microservices Technology
The legacy application usually has tight coupling across the IT components, making it difficult to adopt new architecture. The modern-day DevOps practices incline toward microservices architecture to deliver business value faster, but a lot of time and effort goes into decomposing the existing application into microservices.
As such, most businesses find it challenging to transition from monolithic to microservices architecture. To resolve this challenge, it is vital to analyze the need to modernize the legacy systems, set explicit goals, and communicate the decisions to the team. A concrete action plan must be drafted and followed to help the teams deliver value, quickly.
- Failing to Realize the Cultural Dimension
The biggest misconception about DevOps adoption is that it is only an IT initiative — often equated to cloud and automation technologies. But it is much more than that. DevOps is about a cultural shift toward better communication, collaboration, and integration across team members and the organization.
However, often, the teams are more focused on tools and lose sight of processes and people. This impedes the agility of organizations and inhibits them from realizing the DevOps benefits. To avoid this scenario, it is essential to ensure the DevOps implementation supports the culture change. Organizations must identify the role of the team members, trace their journeys, drive conversations around new technologies, and enable continuous learning.
· Lack of IT Resources and Skills
It is often difficult for teams to hire new talent and establish an integrated technology stack, ultimately leading to failure in DevOps adoption. A lack of skilled resources makes the transition to DevOps particularly challenging, as it hinders teams from undertaking the task on a proper scale. In fact, apart from implementing DevOps, it is also important to manage various environments for building automated test suites and controlling configuration drifts.
Therefore, the teams should have the right skills to ensure high software quality and minimize recovery time. It is crucial to have a dedicated IT team with the right skills to deploy applications successfully and achieve faster recoveries in case of software failures.
- CI/CD Pipelines for Legacy Components
Continuous integration/Continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is a central component of a successful DevOps strategy. It allows businesses to improve software development processes by making smaller code commits, automating the testing process, maintaining source control, and deploying changes to production faster. Continuous integration ensures checking of code changes into source control, while continuous deployment automates the release process by deploying changes in multiple environments.
The integration of CI/CD processes in the development workflow is challenging for IT teams. It requires adding multiple automated tests to the software development pipeline, adding database code to source control, managing test environments, troubleshooting build issues, etc.
As such, it can be helpful to comprehend the existing deployment process, identify gaps, and build the desired roadmap to ensure the successful execution of DevOps.
Get Ready for Your Successful DevOps Journey
The aforementioned reasons highlight the challenges in DevOps adoption. But it is vital to avoid these pitfalls to get on a positive path toward greater agility and faster value delivery. A proper action plan should be drafted, involving the entire IT team and leadership. Apart from technology tools, it is essential that organizational norms are aligned with DevOps culture, and people from various departments understand the benefits of DevOps.
Get in touch with us for a free consultation about the experience we can put to use to help you adopt DevOps and succeed with it.
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