Top 6 Challenges Of Cloud DevOps And Tips To Overcome Them

As competition gets intense and customer demands get increasingly complex, companies are embracing digital transformation to enable agility and be responsive to evolving trends and needs.

Although DevOps has long been helping them to keep up with new requirements and feature changes, when combined with cloud, the benefits across cost, scalability, availability, and compliance are far too many to ignore.

Significance of Cloud DevOps

In today’s highly dynamic business environment, DevOps and Cloud are integral components of the application delivery lifecycle. Here are some obvious benefits of cloud DevOps:

  • Automation of development, testing, delivery, and deployment processes via a set of modern tools and techniques that helps reduce error, minimize costs, and accelerate time-to-market.
  • Unlimited scalability that allows you to access resources on-demand and keep up with market and business trends through peaks and troughs.
  • Continuous monitoring through advanced analytics provides insight into application performance, resource utilization, and more while delivering periodic reports on overall health and well-being.
  • Seamless capacity planning through dynamic provision of resources, when you need them and where you need them – so you can meet the fluctuating needs of your business without impacting performance or user experience.
  • Faster time-to-market via continuous development, delivery, and deployment of new software releases to production using modern CI/CD tools

Why Cloud DevOps Adoption isn’t Always Easy

Although Cloud and DevOps are a match made in heaven, for traditional DevOps organizations, adoption of cloud is looked at with great apprehension. Here are some reasons why adoption is not always easy:

  • For traditional DevOps teams that have been accustomed to on-premises DevOps tools and systems, lack of cloud expertise makes it difficult for them to enable Cloud DevOps.
  • Poor understanding of cloud costing is another factor that makes Cloud DevOps a challenge for most teams. The many facets of cloud costing along with the need to constantly monitor cloud usage means teams need to have sufficient knowledge of cost.
  • When teams are unaware of modern tools, the inability to scale makes it further difficult to adopt Cloud DevOps. Although Cloud offers unlimited scalability options for application delivery teams, they need to be aware of the tools and ways in which they can enable automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of resources.
  • A good understanding of integration challenges between Cloud and DevOps across different phases of the development lifecycle is something most organizations lack. Poor knowledge of DevOps best practices across Development, Build, Testing, Integration, and Deployment require experience and know-how of the right product set, integration tools, and Infrastructure automation processes.
  • Understanding the many facets of security is also an issue with most DevOps teams that have been relying on their secure on-premises tools and systems. Since cloud security is an entirely different ballgame, many shun away from integrating cloud into their DevOps programs.
  • Ensuring compliance also becomes extremely challenging for teams that are comfortable with basic on-premises security requirements. Given how quickly cloud compliance requirements are evolving, meeting existing and upcoming compliance regulations require organizations to implement robust security policies to ensure their data and processes remain safe, secure, and compliant.

Cloud DevOps – Tips for Success

If you want to make the most of Cloud DevOps, you need to be well-versed with implementation best practices.

Here are 6 tips that can help you overcome common challenges and set you up for success:

  • Build a robust cloud DevOps roadmap: The journey of successful cloud DevOps begins with building a robust roadmap. Having a robust cloud DevOps roadmap in place will allow you to build (and release) applications quickly and efficiently. Make sure to have a high-level, strategic blueprint of product goals, so your cross-functional teams can have a more granular view of processes. A well-planned roadmap allows teams to focus on priorities and it also allows for continuous optimization for better results.
  • Carry out detailed due diligence: Once you have a strong roadmap in place, you need to carry out detailed due diligence to understand your existing processes and see how cloud DevOps will fit into the puzzle. Begin by educating your teams on the need for cloud DevOps adoption and set the stage for a cultural shift in how products are developed and delivered. Make sure to have a CI/CD platform in place and create an automated deployment pipeline for quick releases.
  • Undertake cost-benefit analysis: Although cloud DevOps, when implemented correctly, is most likely to contribute to better cost savings, it is important to undertake a cost-benefit analysis to have the clarity to understand how quickly you can develop applications, how early you can restore from disruption, and at what cost.
  • Embrace the right tools: No cloud DevOps implementation can be successful without the use of the right tools. Therefore, to ensure your efforts reap the intended benefits, you need to do a detailed analysis of available tools and select those that best fit the needs of your organization.
  • Seek help from experts: Complex DevOps implementations are best done by experts; to improve the chances of success, seek help from experts who utilize the right tools and frameworks to implement DevOps best practices, customize workflows to suit your business case, and streamline processes to make implementation seamless and efficient. Experts can also help in ensuring end-to-end integration between Cloud and DevOps while delivering seamless workflows and ensuring all tools work in perfect harmony with each other.

Cloud DevOps can deliver several benefits to your growing organization. To ensure success, you need to be aware of common challenges, and embrace implementation best practices to glean maximum results from your efforts.