DevOps Adoption Challenges and Opportunities

DevOps is a structured way of approaching software development. Today, more and more IT organizations realize its benefits as their irregular release cycles get replaced by streamlined continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.

The advancements in customer-centric service delivery models demand streamlined business processes and improved teams’ culture. DevOps helps automate the processes between development and IT support functions. And, though, the journey from the traditional, siloed IT workflows into a collaborative pipeline often offers setbacks and failures. However, by overcoming challenges and leveraging opportunities, DevOps organizations can move much faster than others.

Release failures and last-minute bug fixes hinder critical project performance.

Therefore, the development and operations teams must be in-line with,

1. Meet diverse customer needs
2. Deliver high-quality products
3. Improve speed-to-market
4. Automate the software delivery chain, and
5. Increase operational efficiency

Further, cultural inhibitors, fragmented processes, and the lack of executive support have created significant DevOps business challenges.

Other typical challenges faced in DevOps include,

1. The differences in priorities between departments
2. Abstraction of DevOps issues and its implementation processes
3. Teams working with different tools and datasets face challenges in collaboration while having a ‘single view’ direction
4. Limited knowledge about available tools and their integration
5. Organization’s resistance to change

Below are some of the opportunities offered to organizations while adopting a robust framework,

1. Deliberation for actionable metrics that are transparent and promote collaboration
2. Building a robust culture to enhance IT service deliveries
3. Speedy delivery with the extension of agile principles and practices
4. Frequent deployments and faster lead times
5. Elimination of waste (time and resources) due to unplanned work or rework
6. Enhanced security and automation with lesser time spent on remediation
7. Higher employee engagement and retention

DevOps in the cloud is a game-changer because it supports,

1. Better security strategies
2. Quick software looping of user demands
3. High-quality development, testing, deployment, and operations

DevOps automation significantly lowers the infrastructural cost associated with on-premise public and private clouds. It also supports centralized governance.

At Rishabh, we help restructure the traditional server architectures to enhance application performance, data management, and the complete security of your data.

Rishabh’s DevOps model has evolved from Agile and Lean methodologies. It is while being tested across architectural shifts. We enable enterprises to adopt DevOps with how to collaborate, cooperate and coordinate as a mature organization along with the right tooling. Further, we help them overcome the challenges by improving delivery velocity across microservices, containers, and clouds.

Through our DevOps consulting services, we recommend the best-in-class tools, frameworks, and methods to customers. We are proficient in delivering top quality in the CI/CD implementation pipeline for cloud-based projects.

To meet the challenges in moving to DevOps, we emphasize on strategic, tactical, and operational changes across multiple & disintegrated departments.

We promote a new agile-based culture where the emphasis is majorly on the quality of software. With the aim to;

• Aligning the organizational roles with synchronized teams
• Empowering the line of business (LOBs) and its divisions
• Organizing application clusters and programs
• Optimizing individual performances and outcomes
• Obtaining early feedback for processes and products

DevOps provides a clear understanding of the new perspectives, practices, and measurements that smoothen the paradigm shift for LOB teams. Additionally, we encourage teams-leadership communication to reduce the perceived risks/gaps and promote a unified corporate vision.

It is crucial to assess your current technical loopholes, systemic issues, and software delivery ecosystem limitations before adopting DevOps. A readiness assessment lets you identify the pain-points and prioritize multi-dimensional changes.

We offer a clear and factual evaluation of your development and operational challenges in DevOps. It is by assessing your current and benchmarked values for 25 elements of DevOps adoption. And, is across six key areas – source control, build management, release management, deployment, test management, and monitoring.

Each assessed state is measured against the relative benchmarked value to determine the DevOps maturity of your organization & determine any existing technical challenges in DevOps. A snapshot is shown below.

This assessment includes both readiness and maturity analysis. And, it provides insights into changes that are needed to take full advantage of DevOps’ benefits.

Scope

The following represent the scope of activities for Rishabh’s DevOps readiness assessment.

• Interviews with key stakeholders using an AI-based collection tool
• A detailed review of the organization, services, and technology stack
• Evaluation of architectures, consumers, and suppliers with their impact on DevOps acceptance
• Analysis for maturity, readiness, SWOT, and priorities
• Recommendation presentation creation
• Recommendations presented to stakeholders

Post the initial assessment; business owners need to answer three questions before determining their DevOps readiness.

1. Is there a Management-Employee Agreement? – If there is a top-down agreement in place, the company is already halfway through the success road.
2. Is there a Plan in Place? – Companies need to have a detailed strategy, equipped with process tools and clearly outlined roadmap, and best practices chalked out. Then, the culturally different teams need to collaborate and work ways to learn and equip themselves with the technologies & methods of each other’s processes.
3. Is the organization ready to invest (time, money, and resources) for the giant leap? – It involves the implementation of DevOps in stages, iteratively, and testing the organizational adaptability in smaller steps

Key Outcomes and Deliverables

Documented readiness for fully embracing DevOps

• DevOps Maturity Assessment
  • Maturity Rating
  • Diversity of Responses
• DevOps Readiness Report: An assessment report that highlights,
  • Prioritized opportunities for DevOps adoption
  • Recommended next steps:
    • Culture
    • Automation
    • Measurement
    • Sharing

How You Will Benefit From this Assessment

1. Clear and validated comparison of current IT service spending and value delivered to customers
2. Impact analysis of alternatives to potential changes to service delivery
3. A clear view of the current cost and service delivery profile and options for improvements
4. Recommendations for increased value delivered by the service process

Connect with us today to get your DevOps readiness assessment, along with a blueprint of future roadmap for change.

As part of the next series, watch out for live use-cases on how Rishabh helped growing enterprises meet the challenges in implementing DevOps in our next article.