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Top 5 DevOps evolution blockers

Even though DevOps often confirms the claimed benefits, many companies have been stuck in the middle of their transformation journey, with organizational and cultural factors remaining the top DevOps evolution blockers.

A great number of companies implement DevOps nowadays, which, in theory, is a good thing. The actual problem is rushing into DevOps evolution without a clear understanding of how it works and taking DevOps for granted as a panacea for the secure delivery of applications and services at high velocity.

You might have invested in automation a lot – but the problem is that you haven’t addressed the organizational silos and misaligned incentives around deploying software to production. According to the research report,

only 10% of respondents say their companies are very successful at overcoming blockers to DevOps evolution, while 27% are “laggards” with unsuccessful quick development and implementation.

So, why do companies fail to adopt a new DevOps approach to working with technology? And what are those cultural, organizational, and process blockers to DevOps evolution businesses face?

We have leveraged our deep expertise to give you the answers. Let’s discuss it blocker by blocker in our blog article.

DevOps evolution blockers

DevOps evolution blocker #1: Traditional processes and technologies

Breaking old habits can be extremely challenging. Though DevOps requires changes and shifts across the organization, it’s not just about implementing new technology.

Instead, it’s much more about people, processes, and then technology. Your biggest mistake might be focusing only on one or two key elements, while DevOps evolution requires all three: culture change, agile processes, and new technologies.

According to the Harvard Business Review Report,

• 50% of enterprises say organizational silos are the greatest challenges to delivering value to the market faster;
• 49% cite monolithic architectures, physical servers, and waterfall methodologies as a DevOps evolution blocker;
• 46% say resistance to change is a major issue.

DevOps approach involves team collaboration and product orientation when all business processes become increasingly agile, with continuous delivery and automation everywhere. Also, new technologies – clouds, containers, microservices, APIs, serverless technologies, etc. – must be adopted.

Leaving traditional technologies aside and shattering old business mindsets, companies get extremely effective SDLC, with continuous delivery of new features and continuous improvements that satisfy all the customers’ demands.

DevOps evolution blocker #2: Dev and Ops gap

According to Atlassian DevOps Trends Survey, 46% of organizations are relatively new to DevOps, with less than 3 years of such experience. Thus, they do not understand whether their processes are development-oriented or activity-oriented. It happens because of the traditional conflicts between development and operational goals.

The best solution here is building collaboration between development and deployment teams, namely through DevOps. It can be achieved when you recognize the existing confrontation between Dev and Ops and encourage collaboration between all your teams.

Profisea recommends trying DevOps first at a small scale or at a separate stage of deployment. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Thus, our DevOps –savvy engineers define KPIs (deployment speed, deployment frequency, bug quantity, etc.) for the test run to start adoption.

Throughout this trial, your teams learn to communicate, respond to feedback, analyze their KPIs, and use best DevOps tools to reach the main goal – rapid development, high-quality software delivery, reducing costs and risks for the organization’s and end users’ benefits.

Based on these trial results, soon your business will soon start scaling DevOps operations up, expanding to more teams and more workflows.

DevOps evolution blocker #3: Lack of deployment strategies

Depending on where your company is in DevOps evolution, it may or may not have learned how to implement deployment strategies. These strategies focus on high-quality deployment and risk management to launch a new version of the software solution successfully.

Deployment strategies include A/B, Blue/Green, Recreate, Ramped, Shadow, Canary, etc. Each of them recognizes that there are many types of changes, and not all of them meet the same standard. You should test changes first to check their quality and only then implement them with confidence. And this process can be repeated with continuous experiments.

The main benefits of rapid, controlled implementation of changes are reduced downtime and reduced risks that make companies more efficient by delivering high-quality features to their end users more frequently.

Adopting deployment strategies may not be the first thing you do when implementing DevOps, but it would be a mistake to overlook the benefits of using more advanced forms of deployment as your DevOps implementation evolves.

Launching new features successfully with any deployment strategy isn’t an easy task. DevOps teams need to understand what values they are shipping to their users. Fortunately, Profisea offers solutions to launch and release new features for your products with any deployment strategies.

DevOps evolution blocker #4: It is all about money