Top Challenges in DevOps and How to Solve Them

DevOps consists of the overall culture of software development, so it must optimize the pipelines by looking at every factor such as the development process, technology, people, and more that makes up the software ecosystem. After all, the developers implement DevOps best practices to enhance the efficiency of the entire software development life cycle.

But there are many roadblocks to the effective implementation of DevOps practices. Therefore in this article, we are going to address these challenges and discuss potential solutions for them as well.

Common DevOps Challenges and Their Solutions

1. Environmental Challenges in DevOps

The ownership of a codebase keeps changing from the development team to the deployment team through a testing team during DevOps. A lot of time and effort are wasted in such transitions because for every separate team, a separate coding environment has to be configured and the code also has to be modified in a way that it can work smoothly under all of these environments. This also leads to confusion where sometimes teams are trying to find a problem in the code when in reality the fault lies in the environment they are running the code in.

Solutions

First, you have to ensure that all environments are identical. Also, build infrastructural blueprints to enable continuous delivery but for that last part, all teams have to come together to plan the continuous delivery process to make sure that the transition remains smooth.

And to make that happen, you can adopt a cloud-based infrastructure. Because every aspect of DevOps like coding, testing, deployment, post-production monitoring, and more would require different tools and they have to be hosted in different environments. 

The cloud can help you build a centralized architecture to host all these pipelines. Different teams can still access the code through cloud infrastructure and the cloud environment will easily manage the environment transition.

2. Challenges with Team Maturity and Competence

The ability to adopt the DevOps transformation to the software development process is directly related to the core competence and the level of maturity of a team with the SDLC. The need of delivering high-quality software in a shorter timeframe demands the implementation of DevOps best practices.

A continuous cycle of code build and testing from DevOps intends to revolutionize the traditional software development cycle. And a better integration of the development process and operations will help you deliver reliable software on time.

Solutions

Before adopting DevOps practices and investing in DevOps tools and technologies, companies must also invest in training and upskilling their team members. A powerful DevOps culture includes:

• Increasing inter-organization communication by building new interaction points
• Improving processes and pipelines by constantly getting feedback from the stakeholders.
• Guiding DevOps adaptation and improvement using relevant metrics
• Preventing teams from working in silos

3. Dealing with Obsolete Practices

Sometimes organizations struggle to modernize their legacy processes and practices, so to transform their SDLC, organizations adopt DevOps.

These organizations have a history of working in silos. They have a specific team for specific tasks like programming, testing, operations, and more. These teams usually work in silos without having any kind of communication with each other. Such an environment does not help teams when they are working with outdated tools that are inflexible and pipeline inefficient.

Solutions

Although many aspects of the DevOps pipeline are automated, some of its parts still need human intervention. To smoothen the transition and to improve the overall efficiency, teams have to work cooperatively and transparently.

4. Challenges with Monitoring the overall DevOps process

One of the most common problems with DevOps implementation is the monitoring of the overall DevOps process. The process has several moving parts and all of them have separate metrics to judge their effectiveness.

For example, CI/CD processes have several code branches or deployment frequency as a metric for judging their effectiveness. Meanwhile, the Continuous testing pipeline is measured through the defect escape rate.

This is the reason why there is a lack of clear visibility over the entire DevOps process which might result in delayed production. That would often lead to finger-pointing which is not good for the eighth team or the project. If such a process is undertaken without oversight then not only the final product is prone to errors but the entire process is too risky to continue.

Solutions

You can have a continuous overview of the network components, services, metrics, and applications using the continuous monitoring tools like Nagios Core. it enables you with a bird eye view of the infrastructure. This helps you detect if there is a critical issue in the process.

These tools also offer services that can help you solve these issues. That ought to improve the flexibility and scalability of the software product. It also keeps you updated with all DevOps events, system outages, code crashes, and failures. Such an automated viewpoint helps the team know exactly what went wrong and where. And then help make sufficient changes to rectify those issues.

5. CI/CD Performance Issues

An improper implementation of a CI/CD pipeline would cause many issues like poor memory optimization, deployed server responses, slower loading speed, and more. These issues can seriously affect the performance of the software application.

Such suboptimal performance of an application is said to reduce the overall time spent on a site as well as increase bounce rates. A seemingly less span of mere 1 second can cause –

• Reduction in page views by 11%
• Reduction in customer satisfaction by 16%
• Reduction in conversion rates by 7%

All of these stats are provided in a Deloitte study.

Solutions

Performance testing must be conducted by the QA teams by employing tools like Apache JMeter that use automated testing principles. 

6. Version Control in Test Automation

For every process and component to work properly, DevOps relies on version control. But if any unexpected change or update occurs in any single process, the entire pipeline will face compatibility issues and eventually break down. This is a common occurrence during automated system updates.

For any continuous automation process, a suboptimal automated test is a disaster. The primary focus of the DevOps [process is to deliver production-ready code within a shorter time frame. So, to avoid any kind of flawed tests, it is critical to have the right automation testing tools and techniques in place.

Solutions

This problem has a simple solution: force-stop all the auto-updates. No process or component should be updated without human intervention. And never incorporate the unstable version in the process. 

The QA teams must choose the right testing tools for they should be compatible with the system and languages that are used in the project. Additionally, you can spot red flags before any major issue happens in the system with the help of model-based testing.

7. Security Issues

If there are some security weaknesses in a DevOps pipeline then it makes the system vulnerable to cyberattacks. This may result in the theft of sensitive information.

Solutions

• Whenever in the pipeline you spot an irregularity, immediately lock that part of the system.
• Implement an effective monitoring system that helps you detect and resolve such threats quickly
• Limit the amount of sensitive information in your code
• Use code analysis tools to quickly address the vulnerable section of your code.

8. Scalability of Test Infrastructure

Scaling the operations and testing capabilities is one of the biggest challenges you will face in continuous testing. Apart from that, handling large volumes of data and devices is a challenge in itself.

Solutions

The data capacity, increased device load, version updates and more can be managed effectively and flexibly if you use Selenium-based test infrastructure.

9. Interpretation of Complex Debugging Reports

To fix the bugs in your software application, you must have a test report that you and the stakeholders can interpret accurately. Test reporting is indeed complicated but it becomes more complicated when you generate more than one test report and all of them have different results. What results would you follow? This issue will also deploy the bug fixing as well as the deployment of the product.

Solutions

• Integrate real-time reporting
• For a faster debugging process, implement data visualization
• In a DevOps pipeline, analyze event logs at various points. This will help you make sure that the dependencies are correctly handled as well as the build is generated consistently as per the expected standards.

Summary

There might indeed be many problems during the implementation of the DevOps process. But if you are careful in picking the right tools and have the necessary training or experience then everything will be relatively easy to handle. A robust testing method always provides accurate results on real browsers and devices no matter how many challenges you face in DevOps. So, in the end, doing that along with the effective implementation of DevOps best practices will help you overcome the challenges and get ahead with the DevOps process.