Burdened by slow development workflows? This might be due to environmental inconsistencies, legacy processes, and scalability issues. Although DevOps is integrated to enhance the efficiency of the development process of a software, i.e, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), many companies still face challenges that hinder its adoption and success.
DevOps Challenges That Companies Face and Their Solutions
Disconnected communication, integration issues, and inconsistent environments can slow DevOps deployment cycles. This may increase errors and reduce team efficiency, delaying innovation and impacting the overall reliability of software delivery pipelines. DevOps consulting services help companies navigate these challenges effectively.
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Environmental Challenges
From development and testing to deployment and production, the ownership of the codebase changes frequently from one team to another in DevOps. These transitions require different environments that are configured separately, resulting in wasted time and effort needed to modify the codebase to ensure it works smoothly on all these environments. This creates confusion among teams, as they investigate problems in the code rather than the environment, resulting in additional time wasted.
Solutions
Developing infrastructural blueprints for Continuous Delivery (CD) ensures identical environments and a smooth transition. A reliable solution to enable this will be to adopt a cloud-based infrastructure for DevOps. Different aspects of the DevOps pipeline – coding, builds, testing, deployment, and post-production monitoring require various tools to function, and these tools are hosted on different environments. That is why hosting these pipelines on the cloud helps to create a centralized platform that enables different teams to access the codebase and achieve a smooth and seamless transition between different environments.
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Competency
A software engineer team’s competency with the Software Development Life Cycle is directly related to their ability to adapt to the DevOps transformation of these processes. The primary focus of DevOps is to deliver high-quality software within shorter deadlines. To achieve this, the DevOps process transforms the conventional Software Development process by creating a continuous cycle of Coding-Building-Testing, and integrates better development and operations processes.
Solutions
Adopting the tools and technologies that align with your DevOps pipeline, investing in training and upskilling employees, and building an advanced DevOps culture will help with competency by:
- Building new interaction points to increase collaboration and communication
- Improve pipelines and processes through constant feedback
- Prevent workflow and team silos
- Leveraging relevant metrics for improvement
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Eliminating Obsolete Practices
The main reason for organisations to adopt DevOps is to transform their SDLC processes and modernise legacy processes and practices. Previously, organisations have had gaps between development, testing, and operations teams. They have also had to work with outdated tools that are inflexible in terms of communication and pipeline efficiency.
Solutions
Although DevOps pipelines are automated, some parts require human intervention. Having transparency and cooperation among teams will smooth the pipelines and improve efficiency. Tools like BrowserStack Live allow teams to collaborate effectively by enabling seamless interaction and communication and helps track bugs. Companies can also file issues in an organised manner and tag relevant members on the same dashboard for creating a unified approach to handle the entire DevOps pipeline.
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Monitoring the overall DevOps process
The DevOps pipeline is constantly moving and has various elements that need to be judged through different metrics for their effectiveness. Monitoring the entire process can be a tedious task for DevOps. This often causes a lack of clear visibility through the entire process, and that results in finger-pointing and delays. This leads to manual processes that require extensive labour and risk human error.
Solutions
Tools like Nagios Core help companies to monitor applications, metrics, services, network components, etc, continuously. Offering a bird’s-eye view of the infrastructure and detecting critical issues, tools like this resolve these issues and provide scalability and flexibility. It also provides current logs of DevOps events, issues, code crashes, and system outages, giving teams the information about exactly what’s gone wrong and where, and resolves them.
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CI/CD Performance Issues
Repetitive issues such as slow page loads, delayed responses from servers, and poor memory optimization that obstruct the overall performance of the application are caused by implementing a weak CI/CD pipeline. A recent study by Deloitte indicated that a low-quality website in terms of performance increases the bounce rate and decreases overall time on the site, resulting in:
- 11% Reduction in page views
- 16% Drop in customer satisfaction
- 7% Decrease in conversions
Solutions
Tools like Apache JMeter can be used to automate testing, and the QA team can check its performance. Tools like BrowserStack SpeedLab enhance UX by real-time web performance testing and analyzes the website on key performance metrics. Allowing speed tests, these tools monitor different elements during page load, including CPU Processing Breakdown, Navigation Timing API, and Page Resource Summary. It compares mobile and desktop screenshots to provide insights and optimize performance.
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Version Control
DevOps relies on version control and processes to work on stable versions. Any unexpected update or change in the process can result in a breakdown of the entire pipeline and compatibility issues. This can commonly occur during automated system updates. Low-quality automation tests can be a fatal blow for any Continuous Automation process in the DevOps pipeline. Avoid flawed tests and deliver production-ready code in short sprints by integrating correct automation testing tools and techniques.
Solutions
Putting a forced stop to all auto-updates ensures manual intervention for software updates and saves the process from incorporating unstable versions. It is crucial for the QA team to choose the correct testing tools compatible with the systems to identify threats before they cause major disruption to the overall system.
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Security Issues
Security gaps in the DevOps pipeline can increase the risk of cyber-attacks and lead to compromised information.
Solutions
- As soon as irregularities are detected, it is important to lock those parts of the pipeline immediately
- Set up an effective monitoring system that detects and resolves threats quickly
- Eliminate risks by limiting the amount of sensitive information in the code and avoiding the use of vulnerable code using Code Analysis tools.
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Scalability
One of the major challenges in Continuous Testing is to scale the operations and the test capabilities at the same time to handle increased volumes of data, devices, etc
Solutions
Selecting a Selenium-based test infrastructure will allow the companies to be more flexible, handle version updates, increase device load, and manage data capacity.
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Complex Debugging Reports
Many test reports are complex and difficult to understand. This causes delays in bug fixes, thereby affecting product release velocity.
Solutions
- Incorporating real-time reporting
- Having reports that are visually easy to read for faster debugging
- Analyzing the event logs to ensure data is consistent with expected standards
Conclusion
Even though there are a number of challenges in DevOps, they can be overcome and resolved easily with the right tools and training. Regardless of the DevOps challenges being faced by any organisation, having an advanced testing methodology that allows accurate results on different browsers and devices is a must.
