Look at any IT ecosystem today. You’ll likely find a complex web of legacy and cloud systems, manual and automated processes, monolithic and microservices architectures, and more. Implementing DevOps and ensuring its success in such complex IT environments is a Herculean task that requires thorough and thoughtful planning by every stakeholder.  

DevOps Challenges in Complex Environments

Today’s IT environments present several challenges in DevOps implementation. These include:

• Navigating hybrid systems: Complex IT environments present significant challenges for DevOps due to their intricate infrastructure, outdated systems, and siloed teams. With multiple interconnected systems, technology stacks, and hybrid tools, it becomes difficult to establish seamless workflows and consistent automation across the entire environment. The presence of legacy systems also complicates integration with modern DevOps practices, requiring time-consuming and resource-heavy modernization initiatives.
• Ensuring collaboration between large, siloed teams: Communication gaps between development, operations, and security teams are common in large environments, which can hinder the speed of delivery. Misaligned goals and differing department priorities lead to fragmented workflows, delays in decision-making, and duplicated efforts.
• Overcoming tool fragmentation: Tool fragmentation is typical in large, complex IT environments leading to a fragmented and inefficient ecosystem of overlapping tools that lack integration. This often results in increased complexity, higher maintenance costs, and difficulty tracking performance across different systems. Furthermore, the lack of interoperability between tools can slow down automation efforts and hinder seamless collaboration between development, operations, and other teams.
• Simplifying complex underlying architectures: DevOps teams struggle to simplify complex architectures when operating in large IT environments. Addressing dependencies, enabling real-time data sharing, and fostering collaboration is highly time-consuming, taking DevOps teams’ focus away from critical priorities such as building efficient DevOps workflows or improving overall system agility.
• Maintaining consistent configurations and software versions: In large, complex IT environments, the scale and diversity of systems make maintaining consistent configurations difficult. Multiple teams working manually on different components can lead to discrepancies and compatibility issues. At the same time, frequent changes across diverse platforms can make version control complex, lead to configuration drift, and result in unpredictable deployments.

DevOps Best Practices to Embrace

To navigate complex environments and ensure DevOps success, teams must embrace certain best practices:

• Conduct detailed audits of the environment: In complex IT environments, conducting detailed audits can help identify inefficiencies, gaps, and areas for improvement. Organizations can uncover bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, or misaligned objectives that hinder DevOps adoption by assessing the current infrastructure, workflows, and collaboration practices. Evaluating existing automation, code quality, deployment pipelines, and communication channels can enable the creation of a tailored DevOps strategy that addresses specific challenges, optimizes workflows, and sets the foundation for seamless integration, continuous delivery, and enhanced collaboration.
• Break down silos: Large and complex IT environments most likely will have many departments and teams managing different aspects of the ecosystem. To ensure DevOps success, it is essential to break down these silos and foster collaboration and communication between traditionally separate teams. This collaborative approach promotes shared responsibility, supports continuous integration, delivery, and monitoring, and ensures all teams are aligned and working towards common goals.
• Enable agile project management: Taking an agile and iterative approach to DevOps can help organizations deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. In large IT environments, working on development in smaller increments, instead of waiting for a single massive release date, offers a great way to respond to trends and opportunities and pivot as necessary.
• Ensure shift-left testing: The chances of errors in complex IT environments are naturally higher. Adopting the shift-left testing approach offers a great way to minimize the probability and impact of bugs and errors. By integrating testing into the development process, teams can identify and resolve bugs while working on the codebase’s relevant section, thus strengthening software quality and reducing costs.
• Use the right DevOps tools: Tools play a critical role in enhancing the success rate of DevOps in complex IT environments. Choosing the right toolchain for each phase of the DevOps lifecycle, with essential capabilities to improve software quality and speed of delivery, can help teams tackle key DevOps fundamentals, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration. Rather than opting for an all-in-one DevOps toolchain that might not integrate with other systems or lack capabilities to evolve to fast-changing requirements, teams must choose a customized toolset to adapt DevOps workflows by teams and by project. 
• Adopt automation: In large and complex IT environments, automation enables developers to integrate their code changes frequently into a shared repository. Teams can enable scheduled batch uploads and frequent commits by accurately and quickly completing tasks such as code integration, testing, and deployment. By streamlining and accelerating the software development lifecycle, they can facilitate faster time-to-market, boost scalability, and allow systems to adapt swiftly to changes in demand.
• Ensure observability: Observability offers insights into the system or application’s operation. Using logs, traces, and metrics, DevOps teams can better analyze the performance of various system components, track key performance indicators like CPU/RAM usage, disk space, and network connectivity, and track the flow of logic within the software application.
• Focus on continuous feedback: As IT environments expand, focusing on constant feedback can lead to substantial improvements in app functionality and user experience. DevOps teams can use stakeholder inputs to make informed decisions while monitoring application performance to identify bottlenecks, increase resource efficiency, and drive continuous improvement.

DevOps Implementation Mistakes to Avoid

While teams need to embrace the above-mentioned best practices to navigate complex IT environments, here are some mistakes to avoid:

• Looking at DevOps as an IT project: As IT environments get increasingly complex, DevOps can no longer be looked at as a project with a definite start and end date. DevOps is more a way of operating and demands culture alignment between dev and ops to improve customer experiences, drive business agility, and improve operational resiliency. To successfully implement DevOps, organizations must foster a culture emphasizing continuous integration, continuous improvements, and a shared responsibility mindset. This can help accelerate time to market, improve product quality, and enhance adaptability to changing market conditions.
• Compromising quality for speed: Time-to-market pressures often cause DevOps teams to compromise quality for speed. According to the State of DevOps Report 2023, only 18% of organizations achieved elite performance by deploying on demand. Jumping quickly into continuous deployment and frequently pushing code changes into production without adequate planning/testing can break things and risk user experience, as end-users don’t always tolerate frequent app deployments during peak usage. Organizations must devote sufficient time to testing and ensure observability via AIOps to minimize risks and ensure deployments meet expected service level objectives.
• Taking the monolithic approach: In large IT environments, taking the monolithic approach can add to the complexity. As systems grow and become more intricate, tightly integrated components can lead to scalability, maintenance, and flexibility difficulties. As the system evolves, even small changes or updates can require redeploying the entire application, increasing the risk of downtime and disruption. To avoid this, DevOps teams must embrace containers and microservices to accelerate changes and feature updates, minimize performance bottlenecks, and innovate quickly.

Implementing DevOps in hybrid IT environments can be challenging, but the benefits make it worthwhile. By embracing best practices and being aware of mistakes to avoid, organizations can attain enhanced agility, efficiency, and innovation.

Don’t let the complexity deter you. Embrace the power of DevOps in your IT environment to thrust your enterprise to new heights.