Implementing DevOps practices offers many benefits to businesses from delivering higher quality software with less issues to more frequent deployments.
Implementing DevOps practices offers many business benefits from delivering higher quality software more efficiently to more frequent deployments ensuring your users benefit from the latest features.
Establishing DevOps approaches and practices can however be difficult - here are some of the top contributing factors:
A systematic review of DevOps challenges found a lack of collaboration and communication is the main barrier to DevOps implementation.
That won’t be surprising to business leaders, but a lack of shared goals, competing priorities and cultural issues can be challenging to address.
The same review also highlighted a lack of skills and knowledge to be the second most frequent barrier to DevOps.
DevOps is a culmination of programming, operations, systems architecture, infrastructure, security, monitoring and automation and the variety of skills needed is rare to find in a single person or even a small team.
Even when such a person or team is properly formed, the infrastructure and wider business become fully reliant on them. The organisation is then susceptible to the actions or experiences of any individual, and one resignation could jeopardise the entire company.
On top of being impractical, the cost of training individuals for DevOps is high. The constant evolution of associated tools makes training staff to keep up with the latest tech (alongside their day-to-day tasks) difficult.
As well as the human resource required, organisations need space and tools to properly maintain their DevOps methodology. Owning all the tools required for a fully collaborative team also requires an extensive budget. Businesses rarely have the resource budget to adapt alongside the latest tech.
Keeping up with the constant evolution of cloud-based services, security updates, systems monitoring, permissions management, and infrastructure changes takes up many engineering hours. Most organisations don't have this capacity in-house.
DevOps projects tend to ebb and flow in terms of workload with higher input needed generally at the start of projects and for specific deliverables.
Businesses cannot retain every expert for the entire cycle, and individuals cannot wait around until they’re needed. This creates a dependency cycle where employees with niche knowledge are highly sought after and impossible to replace.
So, you either pay high rates for each skill set to be constantly available, or you hire a unicorn every 3 months.
Without automation and standardisation, DevOps won’t take pressure off internal teams. If every project is built from scratch, the initial investment is unlikely to generate much return.
One solution to the obstacles outlined above is to outsource DevOps to a cloud-based specialist.
Outsourcing this work can provide access to a broad skillset, experience and a library of patterns and templates to streamline your DevOps competencies. This decreases Capital Expenditure and ROI becomes easy to calculate.
Partnering with a DevOps as a Service provider such as Kodez allows you to harness the expertise you need, as and when you need it.
For bespoke insights into how you can improve your business’ DevOps strategy, sign up for a consultation with the DevOps experts.