Top 3 DevOps Adoption Challenges & Best Ways to Overcome Them

The DevOps turned 10 last year.

But, despite being in the market for over a decade, most organizations don’t seem to have much clue as to how to implement it.

It’s like the saying that goes “Progress comes with Challenges” & DevOps is no different.

DevOps, for those who don’t know, is basically a set of software development practices that help to shorten the development cycle, while increasing the frequency of updates, features, and fixes.

Although there are many companies, big & small, that are progressing towards adopting the DevOps model into their operations. For instance, the DevOps adoption rate reached 17% in 2018 from about 10% in 2017.

A simple Google Trends search also shows a consistent upward growth of DevOps.

But, despite DevOps’ increasing popularity, organizations are facing many challenges while implementing DevOps in their day-to-day operations.

In this article, I will share the top 3 DevOps adoption challenges and how organizations can overcome them in the best way possible.

Top 3 DevOps Adoption Challenges

Though DevOps is famous for achieving automation, but implementing DevOps correctly is an extremely challenging task.

Below, we will look at the top 3 DevOps Adoption Challenges and ways to resolve each challenge during the DevOps implementation process.

Let’s get right into it!

1 — Migrating From Legacy Systems to Microservices

Old infrastructure, even though it has served an organization for years, can still be pretty problematic.

For instance, old infrastructure might cause a lack of support, stability problems, and not to mention the biggest risk of falling behind the rapidly advancing competition.

DevOps, on the other hand, can solve this problem through microservices.

Microservices is basically an architectural pattern in which the individual pieces of functionality are encapsulated in microservices to form a whole system.

Microservices together with Infrastructure-as-a-code can help to achieve continuous innovation.

To put it simply, microservices can modify the software development cycle in a way that can help organizations quickly adapt to the changing needs of their customers.

However, replacing microservices with old infrastructure comes with its own problems that must be managed. For starters, an organization must partner with DevOps services company to establish required foundations of automation, continuous delivery, and configuration management in place to cope up with the increased workloads that come with microservices.

2 — Overcoming the Dev Vs. Ops Mentality

The “DevOps” term basically means “Development + Operations” and it is all about integrating both teams together to ensure that both teams share the same priorities and goals.

In simple words, team integration & collaboration is at the heart of DevOps, and it is the main hurdle an organization must overcome to successfully adopt DevOps in their day-to-day operations.

The best way to overcome the dev vs. ops mentality for any organization is to encapsulate better collaboration practices. For example, instead of working at cross-purposes, both the dev and ops team focus on one common goal.

There are, in fact, many organizations moving towards creating a cross-functional, product-aligned team rather than managing projects. This basically allows an organization to bring developers, testers, and business representatives on the same page through the collaborative process.

This, as a result, helps an organization to boost the developers’ productivity and thus the development speed of their project.

3 — Focusing too Much on Tools

When you’re implementing DevOps for the very first time, it’s tempting to use as many DevOps tools as possible.

While the flashy tools of DevOps may seem like they’re the right answers to all your problems, but in reality, much of the DevOps adoption success depends on your team and your organizational structure.

Let me explain…

Tools indeed play an important role in successful DevOps implementation, but an organization must also focus on training their staff to use them correctly.

In addition to this, it is also equally important to ensure that the tools you’re using meets all the security requirements and are well-integrated into your existing infrastructure.

Simply put, it is of utmost importance that you, as an organization, focus on your team rather than tools. Once you’ve defined the correct structure and processes, you can easily determine the right tools needed to meet the processes.

Therefore, focus on your team more than tools and make sure that they’re well-trained for the newly implemented processes and chosen tools.

Concluding Thoughts…

These are the main 3 DevOps adoption challenges that, if you overcome successfully, will definitely make the DevOps transition a lot smoother.

Though there will be discomfort at the beginning but with the right DevOps partner, you can rest assured that the pay off will be huge in the long run.

If you’re interested, we’ve also written a comprehensive article on how to apply DevOps in your Product development. Be sure to check that out!