Challenges solved by DevOps

DevOps does solve many challenges in organizations. You need to be mindful that many of these challenges have existed for a significant amount of time, have become engrained in how people operate, and that it will take some time to unpick the different levels to achieve what you want to achieve.

Prior to the adoption of DevOps, organizations were ordered in functional teams and reported to line managers, siloed away from the wider business and often each other. If all the conditions were met for deployment, then code was moved through to the operations teams to deploy the application. All these teams, along with others, worked individually, in isolation, resulting in time-consuming activities that were repeated and results that were not satisfactory.

The challenges of DevOps can generally be explained by three statements, which are as follows:

• Developers are unaware of quality assurance and operations roadblocks.
• Quality assurance and operations teams are generally unaware of the business purpose and value of the product.
• As teams work individually, each team has their own set of goals, often in conflict with other teams' goals. This leads to inefficiencies.

The best example for the last point in the preceding list can be made using development and operations teams. The developer's priority is to release new features to the product quickly, while the operations team's priority is to keep the application available and performing highly. These two goals are conflicting, which leads to inefficiencies between those teams.

Addressing these challenges

These challenges are addressed in DevOps by making teams cross-functional, working in collaboration with each other and communicating about other's work and the end results. Overall, this approach increases the feedback's quality and resolves issues with existing automation.

In DevOps, most processes are continuous. With the help of feedback cycles to improve on what you already have, this gives you the ability to constantly mature and evolve your processes, thus learning from previous situations and becoming a more mature team.

Important ote

Addressing the challenges of DevOps is a time-consuming task; you should not expect instant results from a few days or weeks of effort. It will take many months to achieve the goals you have set out.

Now that we have understood the challenges associated with DevOps, it's time to look at the phases of maturity in DevOps and see how an organization will progress based on them.