Have you embarked on the journey of chasing DevOps Transformation? DevOps is increasingly recognized as a strong pillar of digital transformation and the staggering increase in the number of organizations adopting DevOps reaffirms the same. The countless benefits associated with the platform have catalyzed it into a movement that is rapidly spreading throughout the tech community.
Lack of proper knowledge and understanding results in the failure of many DevOps initiatives. The implementation part is still a big question for numerous organizations. Without further ado, let’s explore the common pitfalls that can hamper your DevOps journey and how to avoid them.
Building a new DevOps team
The basic idea of DevOps is to foster collaboration between the teams involved in the development and operations including security, QA, and DBMS. That’s news, DevOps is not just about the development and operations teams.Creating a new team solely to handle DevOps will only make things complicated as the development and operations team will have to deal with a brand-new team that is supposed to coordinate with everyone.
PS. The success mantra here is to foster a mindset of collaboration and automation as DevOps is all about an organization that evolves as a single team and not individual dedicated teams.
The Too-Many-Tools Problem
Creating a foolproof DevOps strategy is not about utilizing a bunch of different tools. It is only to realize that each team be it development, security or operations, they will want to use a specific set of tool for DevOps initiatives, even if it makes it impossible to collaborate with other teams. Also, there is no dearth of tools in the market with new tools emerging every day. Undoubtedly, the right tools will play a vital role in deriving the benefit of your DevOps efforts. But the whole point here is to take an agnostic approach understanding that there is no single tool that can fulfill all your DevOps needs.
Lack of Continuous Improvement
Continuous feedback loops are vital components of the DevOps delivery pipeline. It enables a team to inspect, analyze, understand and decide whether a team is heading in the right direction. The faster a team improves the sooner they will reap benefits from the improvements. When it comes to reviewing the process, it is not to be carried out once every six months or every quarter. The crux of continuous improvement is to ensure that every individual involved in the DevOps process should get better all the time
Security Vs speed and quality
The main idea behind organizations adopting CI/CD strategy is to reduce the time taken for developing and deploying new code. But increasing speed at the cost of quality and security is a grave mistake you must avoid. After all, there is no point developing applications at lightning fast speed sacrificing quality and security if they don’t function as intended.
To ensure that you deliver secure and quality digital products to your customers, testing should be incorporated in the development process as early as possible.
Failing to prepare for the culture change
The success of your DevOps initiative heavily depends on the mindset of your team. Are they ready for the big change? The best tools, strategies or practices are immaterial if your team is not ready for the changes associated with faster development, CI/CD pipeline,automated testing, etc.
The best way to avoid the foundational challenge is to plan for a transition period. Ensure that your teams get enough time to familiarize the new practices and also get hands-on experience with the new processes and tools. This will help them prepare for the big changes.
Avoid these common pitfalls and you are all ready for the successful implementation of DevOps to reap greater benefits like improved agility, faster development, increased customer satisfaction, productivity and ultimately ROI. Drive innovation and business growth with DevOps.
