What Are the Top DevOps Barriers? [Infographic]

IT managers are deploying infrastructure components across a wide range of cloud platforms

Pensa has released a new survey of IT executives about their DevOps technology platforms and the biggest challenges they face in the adoption of DevOps practices.

More than 200 IT decision-makers took the Pensa survey online during the month of September. All respondents are actively involved in and familiar with DevOps strategies, although most said they are still trying to overcome multiple hurdles on their DevOps journeys.

Some of the high-level findings from the Pensa DevOps survey results include:

• Limited budgets were cited as the top barrier to DevOps success by 19.7% of respondents; followed closely by the constraints of legacy systems (17.2%); application complexity (12.8%); difficulty managing multiple environments (11.3%); and company culture (9.4%).

• Other barriers for DevOps projects were ranked as roughly a tie between the challenges of testing automation (7.9%); limited IT skills (7.9%); and the lack of executive buy-in (7.4%), which is closely related to company culture.

• For DevOps projects underway this year, survey respondents are mostly active on public clouds including Microsoft Azure (30.5%) and Amazon Web Services (26.6). Many others are using virtualization platforms including VMware virtualization (19.2%); Microsoft virtualization (15.3%); and OpenStack (7.4%).

• The current infrastructure trend is expected to remain similar in three years, when the most-used DevOps platforms are expected to be Microsoft Azure, according to 31.0% of respondents; followed by AWS (24.6%); VMware virtualization (19.2%); Microsoft virtualization (17.2%); and OpenStack (3.9%).

• Fully 35.0% of respondents are driven by a need to deploy applications once a day or several times a day; followed by those who deploy apps once a week or more (24.1%); once every few weeks (16.7%); or once a month or greater (24.2%).

• A majority 51.7% of respondents said it takes them hours to set up infrastructure for specific applications, compared to just 11.8% who said it takes them minutes to spin up new application environments. Another 35.0% said it takes them days or even weeks to set up the needed infrastructure.

• More than half of those surveyed (60.1%) said it is somewhat easy or very easy to access self-service infrastructure; compared to 26.1% who were neutral on their self-service access; and 12.8% who said it is somewhat difficult to access self-service infrastructure. 

“Our initial DevOps survey reveals the biggest barriers to DevOps success involve the cost and complexity of transforming legacy IT environments into complete software-defined data centers, including compute, networking, storage, security, and applications,” said Pensa CEO Tom Joyce. “We also found that IT managers are committed to deploying DevOps on a range of platforms including public cloud, private cloud and on-premise virtualization, rather than being beholden to any single DevOps platform.”