Though some people now believe having DevOps team is a passing trend, but still having a properly managed DevOps teams help boost innovation and expansion.
There has been some dispute over whether DevOps represents a cornerstone of the tech industry, or a passing trend. It’s hard to see how combining methodologies with strategic infrastructure informed by the latest IT is a bad thing; especially given the results. But challenges can choke an honest DevOps effort, if they are too hard to overcome. There are ways to avoid them.
A properly managed DevOps team has strategic objectives tied in with the development of an operating system, or other software applications. This drives innovation, improvement, and expansion. There’s a competitive edge proper DevOps can assist in achieving, and barring the technological singularity that has been theorized for some time now, it seems there will always be a home for DevOps operations.
As cloud computing and the Internet of Things have grown to dominate technology operations across diverse corporate infrastructure, real-time data analysis of Big Data applications have become increasingly tangible. Even relatively limited startups can afford such resources, helping an otherwise small DevOps effort achieve astonishing results.
Still, large or small, those involved in DevOps will invariably encounter operational impediments. Knowing what’s out there can help you prepare and counteract. Following, several considerable challenges to DevOps groups will be briefly examined.
Determine How Your Organization Defines “DevOps”
Development Operations have no set “catechism”, if you will. The ways varying tech groups approach DevOps are as diverse as the software saturating the world. Especially if you’ve got software engineers from differing backgrounds, you will have a need to specifically define what it is, exactly, your organization does. What differentiates you? Are you mixing and matching?
There are such a variety of DevOps strategies out there, you can essentially appropriate those tactics which best fit your business. Agile and Scrum methodologies, for example, are often seen as at odds with DevOps, but if you’re selective, they need not be. Pick what works, avoid what doesn’t, get everybody on the same page, and always seek betterment of the process; as there will always be room for improvement.
Today, application monitoring software and development in terms of PM software, as well as the monitoring of cloud applications, can be integral to performance testing as well as trend prediction. But what is fundamental to DevOps now will shift, keeping pace with that shift is absolutely essential in facilitating profitable forward progress. Keeping pace with these changes is extremely challenging, and determining your internal paradigm isn’t always easy.
Pick Products You Can Realize
Don’t try to re-invent the worldwide web. That is to say, don’t over-challenge yourself. Many DevOps groups end up setting intangible goals, and wear their teams out unduly. Think “tortoise and hare”, don’t think about unicorn corporations.
Facebook was a billionaire tech unicorn because the product fulfilled a niche core to the human condition, and scaled out appropriately. It was created at very little cost and expanded sequentially. Zuckerberg wasn’t trying to change the world; he had other designs. Still, his product hit the market at the right time and blew up.
Now you can’t manufacture something like that. Not deliberately. You can facilitate reliable software, upgrades, operating systems, and more; but that “unicorn” discovery usually surprises even those who make it.
Far-reaching applications exponentially develop beyond expectation almost regularly in the tech industry. If you’re aiming for that, you’ll always fall short. A better idea is to scale up appropriately, appropriately challenging your DevOps team. Do what you can do well, and continue profitable expansion of that.
Ensure Developments Are Properly Tested
Whatever you end up bringing to market must be thoroughly tested beforehand. There are going to be bugs. Beta testing is also essential, so you can find the bugs elusive to the team internally. You’ll need a proper logging framework, and a means of navigating it that isn’t cumbersome. For the most reliable output, you’ve got to get the bugs out.
This is certainly a challenge. Look into what kind of strategies similarly-sized DevOps put to the task on similar problems in order to get an idea your best logging strategy. Reliable, navigable logging is quite important.
Upgrade Ahead Of Moore’s Law—Outpace Legacy Equipment
IBM is so deeply embedded, as an organization, that until at least 2014, it still has machines it produced in the 1970s being regularly used. Naturally, there are warranty and servicing considerations, predicating intranet server arrays which access databases that have been active since the eighties—carrying over from the seventies as punchcards transitioned (for the most part).
Those who must respond to warranty claims and the like thus have to search through multiple databases that are sometimes on legacy systems decades old. It’s not inconceivable that a juggernaut like IBM might have to develop departments specifically for this task; and that’s a cost of millions of dollars.
The market has grown too fast for IBM to properly update the entirety of its infrastructure. They must selectively update. With your DevOps teams, you’ve got a similar issue. Technology moves so quick that if you don’t set up mechanisms to keep pace with it in terms of business, you will be outpaced such that you must pay to maintain older systems necessarily.
What you want to do is initiate a hardware upgrade program that keeps you ahead of hardware developments and associated bugs, while simultaneously maximizing existing hardware usage. Properly budgeting here will always give your DevOps teams needed resources, but it isn’t easy. Solutions like cloud computing are helping to diminish the load.
Anticipating DevOps Challenges
You’ll want to likely utilize cloud computing, as well as infrastructural applications used to do things like monitor employee time, or manage projects. Additionally, it makes sense to define the idiosyncratic DevOps approach driving your business.
Test everything, and get operations on a software/hardware upgrade schedule at pace with the tech market, but just past first-iteration tech that’s buggy. Know what your challenges will be, and plan for them in advance.