Top 5 Issues Curtailing DevOps Adoption - Solunus

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DevOps may seem simple and logical on the
surface, yet most of the companies we talk to are
struggling in one aspect or another. This is no
surprise Successful DevOps initiatives require
putting together a full toolset and
simultaneously creating a smart team of
developers, testers and project managers who are
well-versed in cloud and agile technologies. Thos
e tasks alone can take many months of trial and
error until you are ready to start DevOps in
earnest. After a period of experimentation, its
time to refine and optimize. Focus shifts to more
mature issues such as creating a fully integrated
tools stack, supporting a rich test data
environment that doesnt undermine privacy and
security, and determining the best DevOps
infrastructure strategy for your
company. Regardless of your DevOps maturity,
weve outlined some top issues to consider and
mitigate, as your DevOps practice evolves.
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Integrating Tools
As the practice of DevOps matures, we have seen
an explosion of tools, both open-source and
commercial. These tools serve every discrete need
in the process requirements management, test
management, defect tracking, agile planning,
source code management, build, deployment,
monitoring and more. We calculate there are at
least 1,500 such tools available today. So,
while developers, testers, project managers and
business analysts have many sophisticated
capabilities to streamline DevOps, those tools
must work together. Its imperative that tools
and groups dont work in silos, but are part of
an integrated pipeline. This allows the code to
flow seamlessly according to business objectives,
from requirements definition to test and dev,
production and deployment. Organizations may
choose to create these integrations
themselvesalthough that gets costly fast, both
at the onset and with ongoing maintenance. Some
vendors offer out-of-box integrations with
popular tools, although you must consider if
these will fit your workflows and needs. A few
vendors now offer the best of both
worldsconnectors that are simple to set up and
with the ability to easily customize the
integration when needed.
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Configuration as Code
A common problem in DevOps is the need to align
the environment configuration present when/where
the code is written with the environment
configuration used in production. By adopting
configuration as code (consisting of tools and
processes), you can store all configuration data
as a file alongside the code. This is valuable
because if there are bugs or UI issues, your
staff can quickly locate the version of the
configuration that matches the code/feature in
question and load it into that environment
quickly. If we are confident that the environment
configuration is accurate, we can narrow down the
app failure being most likely due to the code
itself. Having both code and the configuration
setup information in one place is also useful for
testing purposes, as infrastructure
configurations sometimes differ between
development and testing worlds.
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Fast is Not Free
Software teams have always wrestled with the need
to balance speed with quality and cost. You cant
get the best of everything, so teams should
figure out where they can compromise and where
they cant. In DevOps, however, the emphasis is
almost always on speed. Once you reach maturity,
you usually go fast and achieve high-quality
results, yet this requires investing in tools,
process and people. Working smartly can go a
long way toward moving faster without sacrificing
quality. If your team can figure out how to be
efficient and precise, with clear objectives,
then you wont have to do much rework, which adds
cost and time. Many people will flaunt the
benefits of full automation to work faster. In
many cases, however, automation ends up being a
more expensive solution to the problem.
Automation adds additional maintenance and
overhead that needs to be outweighed with saved
effort you will have more tools and integrations
to maintain, and more pieces that will
break. Justify how much automation you need and
acquire only the tools necessary to meet your
goals. Ideally, organizations should determine
the need for speed based on business
requirements. Many industries are not driven by
speed to market and benefit more by working in a
steady, iterative fashion. Make sure you have a
sound business reason for working faster and
releasing faster, and that you can effectively
manage the automation and staff needed to work at
that pace.
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Acquiring Test Data
For high-stakes applications, such as a new
e-commerce site or mobile customer app, there is
a great deal of risk in launching an app that
hasnt been tested on representative data.
Accumulating enough high-quality test data to
find bugs and optimize all the key features and
scenarios before going live can be a monumental
task given todays big data initiatives,
fragmented DB technologies and data
privacy/security concerns. Specifically, when
companies are dealing with sensitive data, such
as customer information and credit card numbers,
this is a tricky endeavor. One common option is
to use real customer data and scrub it to
remove identifying characteristics. If the
cleansing process is not thorough, however,
youre creating tremendous security risks for
customers. Another basic option is to create fake
data thats representative of production data.
However, that data might not be accurate in all
key scenarios, nor comprehensive enough to meet
your QA objectives. Our analysis is that test
data is a complex problem that no one tool can
solve, and should be handled with importance as a
cross-functional initiative. Its not unusual to
see security, compliance, testing, development
and business personnel involved in test data
management activities, especially for companies
handling sensitive data.
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Internal vs. External Hosting
DevOps environments seem to run optimally in the
cloud. Cloud infrastructure gives organizations
the optimal scale, flexibility and speed to run
more builds and test faster through highly
automated services. Top providers including AWS
and Azure offer a full range of DevOps-oriented
services to manage infrastructure for you, such
as load balancing, log and instance monitoring
and automatic backup/failover. With many DevOps
vendors hosting their products and services in
the cloud as well, its logical to host the
entire environment there. However, this isnt
possible for many organizations with strict
security and compliance requirements. Running a
DevOps infrastructure internally requires a great
deal of configuration, maintenance and software,
not to mention staff to maintain it all.
Automated testing often can be time-intensive
when limited machines are available in the
internal network for testing. Running those tests
may require waiting for the weekend to free up
resources, given the many hours required to
complete those jobs. This, in turn, causes
significant delays in testing and code quality
feedback. One solution to this problem is using
containers to scale the internal DevOps
infrastructure. This allows more tests to run at
once and reduces the overall build process time.
Companies strictly doing web development can use
open-source tools to do this. Conversely, large
enterprises with apps on multiple platforms will
need to build out a great deal of their own
infrastructure.
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Its a Process
All of this might seem overwhelming to
organizations just getting started with DevOps.
But remember that DevOps is a journey taken over
time it is more than just new tools and skills.
DevOps is a dramatic and evolving way to develop
software and services that meet the frequently
changing demands of customers. DevOps is the only
way organizations can truly become data-driven
operations, supporting new revenue streams and
product innovation. When viewing it through this
lens, we know that change will be gradual.
Celebrate the small wins with low-risk projects
first, and work to drive efficiency wherever
possible.
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