We have all heard about digital transformation and how it helps organizations become more agile and, hence, more competitive. In almost all digital transformation conversations we encounter, DevOps is inevitable. The adoption of DevOps seems to have become a measurement of how “digital” an organization is.
True, for more than a decade, DevOps has been hailed as the “silver bullet” to many challenges, promising seamless integration, faster deployment, enhanced visibility and cross-team collaboration. Organizations worldwide rushed to embrace the DevOps culture, expecting an elixir for all of their development hurdles. But as we navigate further, it is essential to pause and reflect: is DevOps truly the silver bullet we once believed it to be? Are there unchartered challenges? And if so, what solutions lie ahead? Let’s unpack some of our thoughts on the challenges and solutions of DevOps:
What Are The Top 3 Challenges in DevOps
DevOps Challenge 1: Scalability Due to Scarcity of DevOps Engineers
Born-in-cloud companies are ideal candidates for adopting DevOps because they don’t have any existing practices or processes to “digitally transform” from. They usually start off with a very ideal DevOps pipeline, from the far left to streamlined monitoring on the far right of the DevOps cycle. But when their business grows, their team also grows. With more applications to deliver to the market, more developers are hired to do the job. However, DevOps engineers are difficult to hire. Turnover in the DevOps field is notoriously high, as the cognitive load is immense and the expectations for DevOps engineers to also oversee the business aspect of application delivery often push talents to find a higher-paying position elsewhere, or a less stressful role. Management will soon find out that DevOps engineers are a beast that is very costly to acquire and even more costly to keep.
DevOps Challenge 2: Drowning in a Sea of Tools
To make things even worse, every DevOps engineer seems to have their own set of tools, and all other tools, such as the ones built by the previous DevOps engineer, are next to unusable. With all the open-source tools available in the market, DevOps engineers can quickly set up a pipeline with a totally new set of tools without going through a budget cycle. In the old days, they would often be asked, “Can we reuse existing tools?” during this process. Such a question is perfectly valid, regardless of whether the tools are open-source. Before management knows it, their organization is flooded with different DevOps tools.
Sure, one could argue that as long as the tools serve the purpose of delivering applications to the market faster, why shouldn’t we use them? The key question is, though: is it really faster? And even if it is, by how much? And at what cost? In our experience serving clients from various industries across many countries, it is not uncommon to discover that the resource consumption ratio of DevOps tools vs business applications is almost 1:1. Eventually, management gets shocked by the cloud bills and the packages that DevOps engineers ask for before they hop on to another company. That is when they start questioning themselves: is DevOps as beneficial to the organization as it promised?
DevOps Challenge 3: Difficult to Oversee the Complete DevOps Lifecycle and Performance
Speaking from experience, fully grasping every intricate detail of DevOps isn’t a walk in the park. DevOps has so many pieces in motion simultaneously. And trust me, each of these pieces comes with its own unique set of performance metrics. What I’ve found most challenging? Getting a clear, bird’s-eye view of the entire DevOps journey. Without this overarching perspective, I’ve seen teams get caught up in blame games and unnecessary production delays. Trying to stitch together a comprehensive view is not only time-consuming, but it is also proneproned to human errors.
“Despite the prevalence of DevOps practices across organizations, nearly 80% remain in the middle of their DevOps journey, experiencing varying degrees of success at the team level but not across the entire organization.”
Time to Reassess the Value of DevOps
DevOps can indeed enhance the speed of delivery, but the cost of continuous rapid deployment is not cheap. The unplanned expenses in cloud services, the unclear roles and expectations of developers, and the high turnover of DevOps engineers definitely impact performance and business returns. Maybe it is about time we step back from the hype and take a real closer look at whether DevOps will bring new problems while trying to solve old ones.
Is Platforma Engineering a Solution to DevOps Challenges?
When the challenges of DevOps start to outweigh its benefits, it may be time to look for a viable alternative: platform engineering. There are many values and benefits platform engineering brings. Ultimately, platform engineering focuses on creating unified systems that standardize and manage DevOps processes, ensuring consistent tools and workflows. This approach can potentially mitigate many of the challenges posed by the fragmented tool ecosystem in DevOps. With internal developer platforms as its core, developers can have local experience, but everything is cloud-based. Companies can have better security control and better governance, which can actually lead to genuine efficiency across departments and help to save costs.
Next Step for Digital Transformation: Platform Engineering or DevOps?
DevOps has redefined organizational operations, but it is not, and honestly has never been, the silver bullet for digital transformation. There are merits in both platform engineering and DevOps, as well as limitations. Balancing the allure of DevOps with the potential of platform engineering might be the key to true digital success.
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