Due to lack of standardization of tools along with cultural barriers, firms are facing huge problems in DevOps adoption. Hence there is need for common tools and standards strategy which the DevOps teams need to incept in order to have greater collaboration in development, deployment, and testing. Problems like inconsistent environments, longer provisioning time, manual intervention, legacy practices, and lack of end-to-end orchestration arise when there is a lack of standardization and streamlining the process gaps. Hence there is a dire need for standardizing across the enterprises to make it consistent and predictable. But the process is not that easy else it would have been done a long time back.
The challenges faced by the DevOps professionals in the standardization of the DevOps processes are
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Challenges in tools
1) There is lack of clear integration with most of the DevOps tools which are used in CD (continuous deployment) and also with those teams who aim to build custom integrations.
2) Siloed automation results as a consequence of inefficient expertise in tools which are usually developed in the perspective of automation in a specific domain. The process used for this kind of automation is manual and ad-hoc which is not so conducive to good DevOps process.
3) There are many tools which have overlapping features. Consider the steep learning curve which is required to use these tools efficiently. Moreover these tools are chosen with short term goals in mind rather than the required long-term goals.
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Cultural challenges
1) Being bereft of a holistic view, some DevOps teams often operate in silos even though DevOps was incepted to break those silos and usually follow their own DevOps processes. This is similar to the frog in the well syndrome which doesn’t take ocean into consideration. As a result inconsistent broken processes occur.
2) DevOps teams still lack training in tools, ideal CI (continuous integration)/CD practices, continuous testing and operations. End-to-end automation is therefore a distant goal when there is lack of skilled DevOps resources.
3) Lack of a central authority is a huge challenge in the standardization of process, metrics, practices, organization-level control, and governance in the implementation of DevOps.
4) There is a huge confusion as to how to start DevOps implementation as there is conflict of interest from multiple stakeholders in tool standardization
Process challenges
1) It is a serious issue of a lack of central authority which can decide on the right set of tools for particular set of processes. Individual teams set up their own tools which are compatible with their own teams like development, QA without having a holistic view on the availability of infrastructure which is to be considered in sharing across groups.
2) There is no defined process framework which provides what activities and approaches lead to a desired state. Hence DevOps teams have to achieve their automation requirements without a structured approach.
3) Multiple vendors are following their own process for development life cycle.
4) There is no clear standard KPI (key performance indicators) defined to measure the process of DevOps automation and how best to optimize the process.
As we have put in front of you the various challenges on various fronts hindering the standardization of DevOps process let’s look into what can be done to remedy this.
1) For due-diligence, tools support and solution accelerators there is a good framework called DevOps adoption framework (DAF) which is used to make transition in adopting DevOps seamless.
2) Tools selection has to be based upon the requirements. It should be designed so that it best fits the needs of the organization along QA, development and operations team.
3) There needs to be a central platform that provides standardization in provisioning infrastructure, managing VM lifecycle, defining KPI, giving self-service capabilities across many teams, audit and compliance, measuring metrics and so on.
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Conclusion
In enabling DevOps adoption across the organization there needs to be a central DevOps team which drives the adoption of DevOps. The management of this transition is well understood and should be in the hands of DevOps adoption framework. DevOps process will be streamlined and made to work seamlessly when there is apt consolidation of processes, tool standardization all within a DevOps automation platform.
Learn about the 6 reasons why Organizations can’t do without DevOps and DevOps training is vital.