Top 5 DevOps Model Challenges Enterprises Need to Deal With

It is really not easy to give DevOps a concise, accurate and appropriate definition. However, I have seen a sentence before that seems to explain better what DevOps is-"DevOps is a culture, movement, or practice that emphasizes the communication and collaboration between software developers and other IT professionals. Work together to automate software delivery processes and infrastructure changes."

Now that you understand what DevOps is and what is not DevOps, then you have to think about why your enterprise should use DevOps? In addition to breaking the independent working model between the two decentralized departments, what other significant changes and results can you expect? According to Puppet’s latest DevOps Status Report, they found that “high-performance IT organizations experience 60 times fewer failures and 168 times faster failure recovery than low-efficiency IT organizations. Moreover, their deployment time is 200 times shorter But the frequency of deployment is 30 times higher." In short, successful DevOps organizations can achieve faster product releases in less time and fewer problems.

To achieve a more collaborative DevOps transformation, before you begin, you must understand what potential challenges your company may face.

1. Remember not to start from the top
This is one of the most common problems many companies encounter when trying to implement DevOps internally. In the actual process, it is impossible for any executive to directly copy a successful DevOps model, and it will be implemented throughout the company at a command. Because this is impossible to implement from top to bottom.

A successful DevOps campaign should be initiated by "grassroots" and then evolve into a company-wide cultural change. The most perfect situation is that several development and operation and maintenance personnel work together to deal with some small events and establish a good tacit understanding in the cooperation process. Then this new team atmosphere gradually warmed up and naturally penetrated into the departments of both parties, eventually forming a consistent feedback process and work rhythm.

2. Start with the correct project
Many large and medium-sized enterprises have employees and offices all over the world. There is no doubt that this poses a huge challenge to collaboration. Because whether it is a language barrier or a jet lag problem, or just because of the decentralized independence between various departments, in short, the larger the company, the harder it is to form a perfect DevOps model. This is why it is important to use the right tools to promote collaboration (more on this later). It is also important that when you start to deploy DevOps, you must choose the right project.

Through the use of various tools, if your DevOps team moves forward step by step, although the progress has been slow, but it has achieved substantial results, then the global team members will pay more attention to this new work model, and urgent Want to join. The quality of the products that the O&M and development teams work together will be better, and all team members will be proud of this. Especially after seeing the results of their work, each member will have a greater sense of responsibility, and the next work will also work harder.

3. Innovation of strategy, cloud and tools
"Legacy" here refers to the strategic and instrumental challenges that hinder the DevOps movement. First and foremost is the legacy of the team atmosphere and culture. We often hear management say: "We always do this." That's right, this is why the author emphasizes the need to promote the DevOps movement from the company's technical layer rather than management. Because the people below both need and want to develop to DevOps, once they have achieved results, there will not be too many objections above.

The second remaining question is about existing tools. If your team is still using some antique-level tools that are slow to release and not agile, then you can use this to start discussing tool migration. More and more companies have invested a lot of money and trust in cloud and integrated products. When you decide which tools to buy, you must consider whether they match the life cycle of the application and whether they and other tools can work together to maximize their effectiveness.

4. Quantify results and impact
Another challenge we often hear is that many successful DevOps teams in an enterprise have difficulty getting management support because their results are difficult to quantify. Although Puppet's survey report shows that DevOps has made great achievements, the company's management may not think so. As the leader of the DevOps team, you need to consider the following questions:

How often does your team release updates?

How many support tickets did I get after the update was released?

How long does it take to release an app on average?

What kind of benefits does each app release bring, and/or what brand influence does it have?

These questions will help you assess your current release process and performance, and discover where you can achieve the most improvement. Once you have identified these issues, you can take this KPI data that best suits your company's situation and talk to the management team about your results.

5. Choose a tool set that applies to the entire life cycle
A few weeks ago, the author wrote an article on how to choose the best tools and how to map these tools to the application life cycle. In fact, this strategy cannot be overemphasized, because we often see that some teams choose tools only because they look cool, or some teams want these tools, but in the end they are no longer needed for various reasons.