Concerns With DevOps

To gather insights on the state of DevOps, we spoke with 22 executives at 19 companies implementing DevOps for themselves and helping clients to implement a DevOps methodology. We asked, "Do you have any concerns regarding DevOps?" Here's what they told us:

Culture & Change

• People trying to cut corners without adopting the right architecture and culture. This will lead to failure and the responsibility will be laid at the feet of the methodology rather than at the feet of the people responsible for the lack of implementation. 
• Many companies will jump on the DevOps bandwagon without knowing what they are trying to accomplish. What’s the primary business driver – time to market, revenue, CX, NPS? We drive to identify the right processes and test to make the changes necessary to achieve their goals. 
• Hype and expectations. We’ve been doing waterfall for so long, we’re comfortable and don’t want to change. 
• Although it’s not an issue for me, my concern regarding DevOps would be organizations not realizing the full value. DevOps can’t be managed by one person, it needs to be pervasive throughout the organization. 
• Companies failing to realize this is a long-term initiative that begins with a culture change. They try something, it doesn’t work, they go back to waterfall. These companies are doomed to fail.

Security

• Lack of security being implemented from the beginning of the process. 
• That database and security are still left out of the DevOps methodology at many companies.
• I’m seeing a negative impact on security with obvious vulnerabilities being produced. 
• Data – there’s a lot of it and it’s moving quickly. Moving between systems. With compliance standards, there are new roles for data stewards and data engineers to ensure all of the data is secure since it is all connected.

Other

• It’s a challenge for customers and us with new tools emerging all the time. Be able to say “no” to new tools until you know it’s been tested, validated, and checked for security.
• A lot of new developments like containers, container architecture creates opportunities and problems. Good things get adopted and bad things fail.
• One of the challenges in implementing DevOps is in ensuring that DevOps is sustainable, and fair to our people. Where we have a system with a requirement for high availability, we need to make sure that we have enough people to support it, and for our on-call demands on individuals to be reasonable. We don’t want our DevOps organization to be based on heroes who, in the end, will always burn out no matter how talented or motivated. We want our people to stay with us – this means creating a DevOps team of the right size, one that is sustainable and appropriate for a system that needs to be highly available.
• It’s a playground – a lot of tools have been developed and it’s difficult for people to understand what the tools do and if they are right for them.
• Good implementation is still lacking.

Here’s who we talked to:

• Gil Sever, CEO, Applitools
• Mike Tria, Head of Infrastructure, Atlassian
• John Trembley, CMO and Scott Harvey, V.P. Engineering, Atmosera
• Aruna Ravichandran, VP DevOps Products and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies
• Flint Brenton, CEO, Collabnet
• Tom Hearn, Data Center Architect, Datalink
• Shehan Akmeemana, CTO, Data Dynamics
• Robert Reeves, Co-founder and CTO, Datical
• Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
• Job van der Voort, Vice President of Product, GitLab
• Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr
• Ilya Pupko, Chief Architect, Jitterbit
• Tom Joyce, CEO, Pensa
• Stephanos Bacon, Chief of Product, Portfolio Strategy for Application Platforms, Red Hat
• Michael Mazyar, CTO, Samanage
• Eric Wahl, IT Director and John Joseph, Vice President of Marketing, Scribe Software
• Manish Gupta, CEO and Founder, ShiftLeft
• Martin Loewinger, Director of SaaS Operations and Jonathan Parrilla, DevOps Engineer, SmartBear
• Chris McFadden, V.P. Engineering and Operations, SparkPost