Challenges Faced in DevOps Adoption and Implementation
According to Gartner’s “Hype
Cycles for Agile and DevOps” in both 2020 & 2021, DevSecOps falls on the
slope of enlightenment and is expected to reach mainstream adoption in 2 to 5
years. So, this would be the right time to start thinking about the long-term
adoption and software implementation in organizations.
DevOps Overview
Instead of releasing a large number of
application features, companies are trying to see if a small number of features
can be rolled-out to their customers through a series of release iterations.
This has several advantages like better quality of software, quick feedback
from customers, etc. which in turn ensures high customer satisfaction. To
achieve these objectives, companies are required to:
- The lower failure rate for new releases
- Increase deployment frequency
- Quicker mean time to recovery in the event of a new
release crashing the application
- Shortened lead time between fixes
DevOps fulfils all these objectives and helps
in achieving seamless delivery. Organizations like Google, Etsy, and
Amazon have adopted DevOps to achieve levels of performance that were
unthinkable even a few years ago. They are doing tens, hundreds, or even
thousands of deployments per day while delivering world-class reliability,
stability, and security.
DevOps is a process framework that ensures
collaboration between Development and Operations Team to deploy code to
production environment faster in a repeatable and automated way. The word
DevOps is an amalgamation of two words development and operations. DevOps helps
to increases the speed to deliver applications and services faster. It allows
organizations to serve their customers efficiently and become more competitive
in the market. In simple terms, DevOps can be defined as an alignment between
development and IT operations with better communication and collaboration.
- Earlier to DevOps, the development and operation team
worked in total isolation.
- Testing and Deployment were isolated phases and were
done after design and build. Hence they required more time than actual
build cycles.
- Without DevOps, team members are spending a large amount
of their time in testing, deploying, and designing instead of focusing on
the core part that is creating business services.
- Manual code deployment will lead to errors in production
- Development & Operation teams have a
separate-timelines and are not in synch, causing additional delays.
Source- analyticsindiamag.com
DevOps Lifecycle Phases
Source- TestingXperts
What Is a DevOps Pipeline?
Pipeline in this case is like a horizontal transfer
from one phase to another. Like any software process, this will include the
build, test, and deployment of processes, continuously. In this pipeline, we
discuss the various processes involved in the implementation of DevOps
Though
there are no fixed rules or steps as to how to structure the pipeline, we have
bifurcated them into various levels. But the core steps in them are: Develop,
Build, Test, and Deploy. But even the other activities are important when
better results are required in the long run. The eight activities in the DevOps
Pipeline are:
·
Plan
·
Develop
·
Build
·
Test
·
Release
·
Deploy
·
Operate
·
Monitor
Briefly speaking about the activities, the Planning stage involves
planning the requirements and the entire workflow before the developers even
start the coding. It is usually done by segmenting the project into smaller
chunks. In the Develop and Build phase, you build the source code and
collaborate in a shared source code repository and perform continuous
integration and delivery. With automated testing, you can ensure an error-free
code passing through the pipeline.
In
the Test, Release, and Deployment phases you run manual, automated tests and
validate the finalized code. For Deployment, a blue-green deployment strategy
which is having two identical production environments can be used, or automated
deployment in case of minor changes. Finally, in the Operate and Monitor
stages, you collect data from logs, monitor systems, and get feedback from all
the processes to improve efficiency
Challenges that one might face with DevOps adaptation:
1. Integration
of tools across domains
Throughout the article, you will find the
“Continuous” re-appearing with different suffixes, it is the same here. One of
the key factors and the best practice in DevOps is to have continuous
integration. But not every organization has the capability to build and deploy
processes along with continuous integration, which results in the process being
slowed down and having larger changes over a longer period than short stints.
So having the capability to have REST APIs or capabilities to have integration
is required.
2. Moving
towards Micro-services
Micro services is a type of architecture design
approach, where multiple services use different frameworks or languages to be
formulated and they are simultaneously deployed as a single or a group of
services. Sounds complicated? It is similar to breaking down a process and
performing each of the sub-process independently. With the addition of
Infrastructure-as-a-code to the micro-services to have continuous delivery and
innovation possible.
3. Disparate
tools choice
Development and Operations teams can have different
tools they rely upon for their work. So even before the implementation starts
there is a need to identify and synchronize both the teams for their tools and
expectations.
4. Lack of
vision
At the end of the day, you want two or more separate
teams to collaborate as one, for which a vision is defined with the key
responsibilities of each of the teams and remove the wall between them. This
can be done by experimenting with a few software processes or for a product and
recreating with DevOps practices.
How
to Overcome Challenges:
1.
Understanding the roles and responsibilities of
where dev stops and ops currently starts, and how these can best be integrated
together, is a great starting point for any company, and it’s often the first
hurdle that it needs to overcome as it adopts DevOps practices.
2.
Providing a clear definition of Continuous Delivery
for your organization can help in establishing a common understanding of what
it means to continuously deliver and how to achieve stability.
3.
Having a clear understanding of how to implement the
test strategy can go a long way in getting test automation adopted across the
wider organization, shortening the feedback loops and getting your products out
the door quicker!
4.
Your team and your org structure are key to DevOps.
Once you have the correct structure in place, the processes of the team will
follow. And once the processes are defined, then you can determine the tools
required to meet the processes.
The people on your team are the most important factor when
transitioning to DevOps. If they’re not trained on the newly implemented
processes and tools, there will be confusion, slowing down the adoption of
DevOps practices
5.
A good way to go about this is for the team to start
working closely with any ops folks and taking on shared responsibility for
deployments, releases and operations, so there is shared context between the
two. This allows devs, for instance, to empathise with ops teams on what it
takes to actually deploy & release their code in production.
6.
In summary, these are all challenges we see time and
again that come up within adoption of DevOps in enterprises—and there are many
levers that can be pulled to ensure that new ways of working and a DevOps mindset
is being adopted, whether that’s top-down or bottom-up within the organization.
Ultimately, overcoming these DevOps challenges can ensure the
organization can retain its agility and work towards serving business value
quicker to their end customers—enabling faster feedback loops.
Latest Research in DevOps
Importance
of CI/CD Infrastructure
97%
of respondents agree that testing CI/CD infrastructure is important for their
organization and 85% claim to regularly test that infrastructure. This shows
that most people believe in the concept and its workings but they are facing
issues when it comes to implementation.
Rates of Deployment
Only
5% percent of companies agree to have multiple deployments every day, and a
whopping 85% agree that they have deployments on a weekly or monthly basis.
This is because most companies resist the change to transition from traditional
infrastructure to micro-services.
Expertise with DevOps
And
despite all the tools, process improvements, and investments made, only 4% of
companies consider themselves experts in CI/CD. And only 11% consider CI/CD
infrastructure reliable.
Some
of the key reasons for the lack of implementation of the infrastructure is that
·
People believe there are too many manual processes involved when
setting up the pipeline (~63% believe so)
·
53% acknowledge face challenges to detect infrastructure issues
·
55% People find it difficult to create a “Continuous”
environment across various teams
Why Should Businesses Adopt DevOps
Today’s businesses are moving towards DevOps to overcome the
challenges of growing competition with ever-increasing user expectations. This
methodology helps in breaking down the traditional silos and ensures speed and
responsiveness to production with proper customer feedback. The DevOps practice
essentially ensures frequent communication and collaboration between teams as
they continue to work hand-in-hand.
With this software delivery approach, businesses can easily
automate the regular IT operations with the code development process and
combine the workflows of both the teams from the initial design phase till
production.
Thus, the implementation of DevOps with the
best workflow, test automation and effective practices helps businesses to
achieve huge benefits. Some of the benefits include to enable better
organizational culture, to enhance the software lifecycle predictability, along
with saving considerable time and money by leveraging software test automation.
Source- TestingXperts
DevOps is a culture where collaboration between
development, operations, and business teams is considered a critical aspect of
the DevOps journey. It’s not solely about the tools and DevOps in an
organization creates continuous value for customers. Tools are only one of the
pillars, the other being People and Processes.DevOps increases organizations’
capability to deliver high-quality solutions at a swift pace. It automates all
processes starting from build to deployment of an application or a product. This
paper will provide a comprehensive understanding to apply DevOps methods,
tools, and frameworks in their Organization’s DevOps journey.
Measuring Success in DevOps(KPIs)
Asset Management
In this context, asset management
means measuring what is automated and how effectively it is controlled. It
doesn’t matter if you are using tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible or
Terraform; what matters is how effectively you use them. These tools allow you
to automatically provision bare-metal or cloud assets, as well as join a load
balancer and receive traffic. However, you can achieve similar results from
Kubernetes or chaining lambda functions. Automation is really about controlling
assets to achieve your business goals.
Whether you’re using on-premises
virtualization or cloud workloads, taking the time to streamline your
processing cycles down to the minimum hardware required can significantly
reduce monthly costs. The higher the percent of your servers, containers,
services, etc. are automated, the less time you’ll spend fixing and maintaining
your infrastructure. Some of your applications may be uniquely configured to your
particular organization, and therefore cannot be automated. However, if
applications cannot be automated, it might be time to retire them and build
next-generation applications.
Monitoring
Should you be monitoring all of
your resources? Yes. Should you also filter out the noise? Absolutely.
Monitoring agents should be deployed to all of your servers, and if your PaaS
tools and other providers have integrations, you should be using them and
parsing out unneeded data. The only thing worse than not monitoring anything is
monitoring everything without proper filtering.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment
Continuous integration and
continuous deployment (CI/CD) is the difference between releasing software once
a quarter (or year) and performing dozens of releases to production within a
day.
But it’s one of the most difficult
indicators to measure, since every environment is different. It is important to
understand how many code commits don’t make it past your integration
environment. These blockages could be the result of poor programming practices,
poor code quality or poor testing. However, if features stay in dev or
integration for too long, there is surely an underlying issue. In most cases,
it centers around automated testing.
So, how do you measure good
testing? This is one of the most difficult questions enterprises face,
especially when automated testing is added after monolithic applications are
already written. Essentially, good testing is about creating good business
logic and integrating testing that meets most use cases, while covering each
function and class. Immediate feedback on failed or successful tests expedites
the automation process. The less automated testing is built; the more QA has to
test by hand. Failing to integrate good business and integration testing slows
down the entire CD part of the pipeline significantly. Also remember shooting
for 100% test coverage is unrealistic—over 80% should be sufficient.
It’s also important to remember
applications that are not in a pipeline and must be manually tested will never
keep up with the pace of cloud-born innovation. If you are dealing with a
giant, monolithic legacy app, it’s time to design its replacement (starting
with testing). Pipelines should also have notifications built into them, with
chaining logic to react to failures. Tools such as Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI
and most code repository solutions, such as GitLab, offer rich feature sets to
aid in pipeline creation and management.
Continuous Security
The easiest way to ensure security
compliance is to shift left and resolve security issues in the development
stage. Too often, security is applied at production, which means it’s not part
of the environment’s end-to-end process. Securing applications and networks at
the development level will give you more confidence that applications will
interoperate properly at the production level.
After shifting left, make sure you
continuously deploy and monitor your clusters, nodes and pods in a secure
manner. Ideally, you have a tool that provides a real-time summary of your
cluster’s compliance and security status by looking at workload security and
governance checks, cluster worker node CIS Kubernetes Benchmark checks, cluster
Ingress controller security best practices and istio security checks.
DevOps in digital transformation
DevOps plays an irreplaceable role in digital
transformation.
·
Stabilizing Workflow
·
DevOps reduces the cost of Digital Transformation
·
Automation Promotes Innovation
·
Transparency leads to Increased
Productivity
·
Automated Infrastructure Management
·
DevOps prioritizes faster Consumer
Feedback
·
DevOps can accelerate existing
Digital Transformation Efforts
Benefits of DevOps
Source- TestingXperts
Conclusion
DevOps ensures that applications are deployed
frequently and automatically thereby enabling faster value delivery to end
users. Lean helps in the continuous improvement, removing the extra waste from
the system and processes.
DevOps has evolved as an extension of agile methodology and
enables effective collaboration between developers and IT operation teams and
breaks silos that existed in earlier models. DevOps methodology has many
benefits such as ensures team collaboration, speed of delivery, reliability,
security ensured with effective test automation practices.
DevOps facilitates modern enterprises to maintain
consistency, to innovate rapidly, deliver customer-centric software with
enhanced time-to-market. IGT
Solutions can provide DevOps consulting and implementations services so
that you can do an effective rollout of this methodology in your organization.
Author:
Vijay Sawale has 16+ years of experience in software test
engineering.
As a Asst Test Manager at IGR solutions, Vijay is actively
involved in innovations related to automation test engineering covering new
tools, technologies and solutions, and enabling IGT’s customers to achieve and
deliver quality software product and services.
A result oriented leader, with strong experience in building
great teams, mentoring and hiring best talents, driving growth in quality
through technology innovation. I love to lead high performing teams in creating
new ways of driving quality while maintaining standards and culture. My passion
is building products, leading teams to success while having fun along the way.
