Top 10 Barriers to DevOps

Quali, a leader in cloud sandbox software for cloud and DevOps automation, has released new survey findings detailing the challenges that IT professionals face as they pursue adoption of DevOps practices.

More than 2,000 IT industry executives took the Quali survey online and at tech industry events during 2016, including Cisco Live, VMWorld, DevOps Summit, AWS re:Invent, Delivery of Things, and Jenkins World. The survey was executed in the United States with respondents drawn from engineering, managerial, architect, and C-level roles.

Here are the high-level findings from Quali’s DevOps survey results and from my discussion with Shashi Kiran, CMO.

• Infrastructure continues to be a bottleneck for application development. 54% of respondents indicated that they had no access to self-service infrastructure. This meant that more than half of respondents took a ticket-based approach to infrastructure delivery, impacting productivity and increasing time to market. We should see more demand for cloud and self-service offerings. However, infrasturcture will remain a problem for 10 years — especially in the U.S. where there is significant investment in legacy systems, as well as compliance issues.

• Of those surveyed, only 23% said infrastructure can be delivered in less than one day. Over 33% of respondents said it takes up to a month to deliver infrastructure with 26% saying it takes up to one month or more to deliver infrastructure. Lack of access to the right infrastructure and environment slows application delivery.

• DevOps managers are deploying multiple tools to support their DevOps efforts. The current DevOps toolchain ecosystem is quite fragmented with a mixture of open-source and packaged offerings. The most popular tools cited by respondents included Jenkins (21%), Docker (16%), Puppet (14%), and Chef (13%). The multiplicity of toolchains introduced by different developers and architects working on the same project over time speaks to a diversity of solutions, as well as confusion about the best solution to solve a particular problem.

• The top 10 barriers to DevOps success included the respondents’:

  • Company culture (14%).

  • Challenges of testing automation (13%).

  • Legacy systems (12%).

  • Application complexity (11%).

  • Budget constraints (11%).

  • Difficulty managing multiple environments.

  • Limited IT skills.

  • Budget limitations.

  • Toolchain sprawl.

  • A lack of executive buy-in.

Check out the infographic here:

• Respondents varied widely on the number of applications they now run in hybrid cloud environments. On average, of those adopting hybrid clouds, the respondents run only 23% of their apps on a hybrid cloud platform, with 65% of respondents running less than 24 applications in hybrid environments and only 8% running more than 75 applications. This can largely be attributed to the complexities of a hybrid IT environment, as several enterprises favor hybrid clouds.

• Respondents are still burdened by complex applications that make the transition to cloud and DevOps challenging. Over 44% of applications in traditional environments were considered complex for cloud. This indicates that brownfield and hybrid deployments with legacy integration will continue to be important.

Stemming from the survey results, Quali noted several industry analyst comments regarding DevOps and the challenges it addresses, which are central to the on-going transformation of application delivery:

“While the term DevOps is often associated with leading-edge projects, mastering DevOps isn't only about innovating on the ‘cool’ technologies faster; it's also about building the capabilities to perform modern application development across the board,” wrote Diego Lo Giudice, of Forrester Research in the December 2016 report, Master DevOps for Faster Delivery of Software Innovation. “For many companies, staying ahead of disruption means not only delivering new innovations but also modernizing current software and systems. The underlying cultural shifts, process improvements, and automation of DevOps build the foundation for development teams to mature to the next generation of modern software development.”

“Despite the immense popularity of DevOps today, EMA research data shows a general lack of central governance and automation when it comes to creating new application environments. This leads to pockets of developers using their favorite, often not well integrated, DevOps tools. To clean up this mess, we need a template or blueprint-driven approach with one central management platform or point of access, assuring consistency of deployed application environments, from the app server and backend data to the load testing software,” said Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Hybrid Cloud and Infrastructure Management, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

From the point-of-view of Donnie Berkholz, Research Director, Development, DevOps and IT Ops at 451 Research, “Infrastructure technology is allowing enterprises to compete at the business level in a way that we don’t think has ever happened before — at least not to this extent. The better collaboration between technology groups and the rest of the business, whether it’s internally perceived as the expansion of DevOps or as digital transformation, will continue to drive a stronger role for technology as the next wave of companies looks to become software-defined.”

“We were pleasantly surprised by the response to our 2016 DevOps survey with over 2,000 respondents,” said Shashi Kiran, Quali’s Chief Marketing Officer. “The survey revealed interesting insights on adoption of cloud and DevOps, particularly in the context of hybrid clouds. What stood out most to us were some of the barriers around DevOps including culture, test automation, and integration of legacy investments. These issues are consistent with patterns we’re seeing every day. Quali is working closely with our customers and partners to solve these issues to increase cloud and DevOps adoption. We have expanded our 2017 Cloud and DevOps survey and look forward to gaining deeper insights.”