DevOps and Speed-breakers

SANTA CLARA, USA: Company culture (14 per cent); challenges of testing automation (13 per cent); legacy systems (12 per cent); application complexity (11 per cent); and budget constraints (11 per cent). These can be some of the top barriers to DevOps success.

As per some new survey findings detailing the challenges that IT professionals face as they pursue adoption of DevOps practices, 54 per cent of respondents indicated 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.

Of those surveyed, only 23 per cent said infrastructure can be delivered in less than one day. Over 33 per cent of respondents said it takes up to a month to deliver infrastructure with 26 per cent saying it takes up to one month or more to deliver infrastructure. Also, lack of access to the right infrastructure and environment slows application delivery, from what this survey by Quali, a provider of cloud sandbox software for cloud and DevOps automation, points out.

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 per cent), Docker (16 per cent), Puppet (14 per cent) and Chef (13 per cent).

Respondents are still burdened by complex applications that make the transition to cloud and DevOps challenging. Over 44 per cent 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.

“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 & Infrastructure Management, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

“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.”