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Pavan Belagatti
Pavan Belagatti

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What are the current challenges that prevent DevOps adoption? Let's list

I am listing 6 major challenges here,

  • Resistance to change & culture shift

  • Overcoming the Dev versus Ops mentality

  • Moving from legacy infrastructure to microservices

  • Lack of DevOps and specialist skills

  • Too much focus on the tools

  • Budget constraints

Can you all list the other challenges for DevOps adoption that you have seen or heard of?

Top comments (11)

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

Time and $ and sanity. I am the only dev at my current place of employment, inherited a build system which involves copying and pasting to PROD servers. The code is a mess to begin with, so I haven't been able to get it refactored into something that can be built in an automated fashion. None of my requests for tools get granted and I don't have any time to learn. I started playing around with Chef at home and it is pretty enjoyable, just a LOT to take in all at once.

I am getting ready to leave the company...I haven't endured several near death experiences throughout my life so that I can fix Web Forms applications and sit in meetings all day :D

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

"...I am getting ready to leave the company...I haven't endured several near death experiences throughout my life so that I can fix Web Forms applications and sit in meetings all day :D" Good on you! No need to spean your life doing anything you do not enjoy.

If you like Chef, checkout Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack for comparison.

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pavanbelagatti profile image
Pavan Belagatti

Yes, seeing the differences will help, else these tools are a big mess because everyone just talks about the tools without even understanding the requirements.

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pavanbelagatti profile image
Pavan Belagatti

And you are also talking about the bad quality and legacy code here if I am not wrong.

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

You are correct. I think it is a mixture of two things though. The code quality creates a challenging situation: not sure how much you know about ASP.NET, but this site is an old website application where it doesn't have a project file, so it is more difficult to invoke MSBuild and a lot of templates for building .NET projects provided by build systems aren't applicable.

I also think that the demos and tutorials that are presented on DevOps are too simplistic and highlight ideal cases. Who knows, maybe it really is as easy as some of the demos make it seem. I just always seem to hit some edge case n one else encounters.

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

Moving from legacy infrastructure to microservices I feel like an org could have a DevOps culture but still have a monolithic architecture. The two are not mutually inclusive.

Too much focus on the tools So, very, true.

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pavanbelagatti profile image
Pavan Belagatti

Any organizations you know are still managing monolithic architecture but call themselves a DevOps company?

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Organizational structure: if you're an organization that has pretty much wholly outsourced your IT – particularly if your contracts-style is base-year + Option-year 1 + ... + Option-year N chances are, you've been structuring your contracts to be focused on end-of-project-year deliverables. Worse, each option-year may be bid out to a different consulting company. This means that, not only are your contractors focused on delivery-boundaries (rather than continuous mid-term deliverables), the teams on either side of an option-year boundary may be wholly different from each other.

The above is typical of government orgs with their "hard" FY-to-FY funding-models.

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pavanbelagatti profile image
Pavan Belagatti

Yes, organizational structures are the biggest challenges. Also, I heard the DevOps principles are hard to apply in financial and health industries?

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Kyle Johnson

I'm going through this now and my biggest challenge is getting my developers on-board. Developers tend to not want to adapt to change if they can't see the reasoning for the change. If you look at DevOps from a developer's view, it not really doing much for them. I had one developer tell me, why would I want my code to build and deploy on its own? In my world, our CI/CD pipeline builds, tests and deploys to our QA environment upon check-in.

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pavanbelagatti profile image
Pavan Belagatti

Ha Ha. Hmmm, I see that. It's the biggest challenge many companies face I think, but I also believe it is all about the initial resistance. Once they see the benefits clearly and how automation can help and make their life easy, they will surely opt for it.