How to Overcome Common Challenges in DevOps Implementation

DevOps implementation is in high demand with the rapid growth of the IT sector. The global development and operations (DevOps) market predicts an increase from USD 11.5 billion in 2023 to USD 66.0 billion by 2033 at the CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 19.1% between 2024 and 2033.

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DevOps is a groundbreaking approach to the software development business. It aims to analyze the workflow of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It ensures fast software deployment with an updated infrastructure and collaborative team. However, implementing DevOps presents several challenges.

DevOps requires an understanding of the challenges associated with its implementation. In this blog; we’ll explore DevOps challenges and their most viable solutions.

Top Challenges in DevOps Implementation with Their Solutions

It’s a crucial time to implement the DevOps approach, and many organizations are turning to DevOps technologies for convenience. Let’s look at the challenges and their solutions you’ll experience during DevOps implementation.

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1. Environmental Provisioning

Challenge: The code base changes during the development process, including testing, deployment, and production. Each development environment has unique setups and requirements, making DevOps implementation more challenging.

An old infrastructure, such as a manual technique, makes it more time-consuming and ineffective.

Solution: To overcome this challenge, employ continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). Code updates are automatically built, tested, and distributed across many automated DevOps pipeline phases.

You can also use infrastructure as code (IaC) to manage infrastructure with code. Containerization also stores software code and its dependencies in a container. IaC and containerization allow developers to automate the process, making environment management faster and more secure.

2. Matric Selection

Challenge: Selection of Matric is difficult as several metrics exist to assess the efficiency of a DevOps process. It includes deployment frequency, lead time for modifications, mean time to recover from failures, and defect escape rate. However, not all indicators are valuable for a specific organization, and identifying metrics can be difficult.

Solution: To effectively overcome the obstacle, establish relevant metrics and KPIs that align with your organization’s goals.

Use a dashboard to monitor progress and provide a visual depiction of how the team is going to meet its objectives. This enables your teams to make data-driven decisions and adapt their processes as needed.

3. Manual Testing and deployment

Challenge: Manual testing and deployment is time-consuming and raises concerns about human error, delays, and unanticipated work challenges. Manual frameworks lack reliability and present numerous deployment issues.

Solution: Automation is the only approach that can shift your deployment process and avoid challenges in DevOps. The CI/CD practices involve using automated pipelines to deploy code changes to production as soon as they are ready.

4. Lack of DevOps Center of Excellence

Challenge: Lack of DevOps Center Of Excellence (COE) makes it difficult for an organization to implement DevOps effectively. DevOps without COE costs delays in deployment with increased cost. The team fails to align with the DevOps principles.

Solution: Develop a team that can serve as a DevOps COE. They will meet the principles of DevOps and build a collaborative environment among teams. It will help other teams in case of any hindrance they face while deployed.

5. Test Data Management

Challenges: Effective test data management requires thorough testing and quality validation in DevOps. The lack of sufficient test data can lead to incomplete testing and inaccurate findings, which result in production failures.

Solution: To overcome this difficulty in DevOps implementation, use data masking and synthetic data generation techniques. Data masking enables you to generate realistic but anonymized test data. It preserves sensitive information while assuring thoroughness and accuracy.

Invest in solutions that make test data provisioning convenient and accessible to testing teams.

6. Cross-Functional Team and Cultural Shift

Challenge: Cultural challenge is the biggest hindrance in the DevOps implementation. The siloed working practice among team members results in a lack of collaboration and a communication gap. It leads to delays in DevOps deployment, lower adoption rates, and internal team conflicts.

DevOps implementation requires diversity in the skill set of team members, but a siloed system neglects collaborations and restricts learning and exposure to different technologies and fields.

Solution: Adopt a cross-functional team that overcomes cultural change and allows you to learn and grow in your field. It helps to meet the criteria of diverse skills to solve problems.

Collaboration and communication among team members build trust and a friendly environment to face the challenges of DevOps deployment.

7. Lack of Security and Compliance

Challenge: The lack of security and compliance in the software delivery process may result in security breaches, regulatory penalties, reputational damage, and delayed delivery.

Solutions: Adopt the automated security testing tools and perform regular compliance audits.

Furthermore, your team can use the DevSecOps approach and tools like infrastructure as code and security as code to maintain security and compliance controls across the software development process.

8. Operation of The Legacy System

Challenge: Organizations continue to rely on the legacy system, which entails obsolete technologies in the DevOps process. It also complicates DevOps implementation.

Solution: To avoid the operation of the legacy system, adopt modern tools, revise code, and update present systems through cloud migration. You can also use a hybrid strategy that mixes newer technology with legacy systems.

9. Budget Allocation

Challenge: Budget allocations for DevOps environments should align with the organization’s goals and ambitions. However, DevOps encompasses a broad range of tasks and technologies which makes it difficult to decide which components are most significant and prioritized.

Solution: Involve stakeholders from all over the organization in the preparation of budgets, and set defined rules and practices for allocating funds. This helps ensure that resources are used efficiently to assist with the development and deployment processes.

10. DevOps Tools Implementation

Challenge: Inefficient tooling and a lack of tool integration lead to disconnected processes, slow cooperation, and cause errors.

Solution: To address this challenge, you can use a comprehensive collection of tools that support the entire software delivery pipeline, such as version control, continuous integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. This can be accomplished by linking several technologies via APIs or by using tools designed to work well together.

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Tool installation from a reputed and stable platform provides a clear road map for the DevOps deployment process. When tools interact seamlessly, teams can collaborate more effectively, and the DevOps pipeline becomes simpler.

Overcome Challenges In DevOps Implementation With ZirkelTech

The modern-day problems of DevOps require modern-day solutions to meet the DevOps standards with a diversified professional group. ZirkelTech saves time and protects you from common challenges that cause a delay in DevOps deployment and increase the cost.

We have specialized teams to assist you with rapid testing and incubating solution ideas for SaaS and eCommerce applications. Our DevOps & Cloud experts also assist companies in designing products based on the.Net/LAMP/MEAN/MERN stack.

If you are planning DevOps implementation, contact us to begin your DevOps journey!

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