Bureaucratic friction is still the main obstacle to effective DevOps implementation, according to a new survey from F5 Networks. Conducted onsite at the recent DevOpsDays event in Amsterdam, F5’s research found that as many as 40% of industry experts highlighted the issue as their primary pain point. Common bottlenecks are caused by bureaucratic actions such as changing reviews, altering ticket systems or dealing with manual processes.
The second biggest challenge for DevOpsDays attendees was the technical debt caused by legacy code and systems, with 25% flagging the issue as a major concern. The next most prominent pain point was the incompatibility of production environments at 21%. Finally, the observability of application performance was identified as a challenge for 14% of respondents.
“Clearly DevOps play a much more influential role than ever before,” said Tabrez Surve, Regional Director – Gulf, Levant & Turkey, F5 Networks. “Fundamentally, it is a practice that eliminates sources of waste from the application delivery pipeline. It drives efficiency by optimising processes, removing silos, using automation tools, standardising platforms and establishing a strong culture of collaboration. However, DevOps is not yet adopted by most organisations, so it is understandable that bureaucratic friction and legacy systems are still a problem. Thankfully, automation awareness is growing sharply, and this will eventually lead to wider DevOps adoption.”
The DevOpsDays survey findings follow on from a recent F5 study among NetOps and DevOps practitioners, which indicates an increasing trend for cross-team collaboration and alignment. In the report, over three-quarters of NetOps and DevOps personnel believe the other function to be prioritizing “the right things” within IT, signalling a common understanding of broader goals, and opportunities to increase collaboration between the teams.
Furthermore, the groups are largely aligned on the pace that apps and services are delivered, with the frequency of deployments satisfying a significant majority of both DevOps (70%) and NetOps (74%) personnel. Both segments also agreed that automation within the production pipeline is important, with an average rating of significance on a 5-point scale of 4.0 from DevOps and 3.5 from NetOps. Respondents added that they experienced more confidence in the reliability, performance, and security of applications when the production pipeline is more than 50% automated.
“Before DevOps can make a real impact, businesses need to get their automation processes right. Automation is already used regularly in everything we do. It is also required in all three phases of implementing a DevOps culture: automating the existing environment, automating cloud migration, and automating cloud-native services,” added Surve.
TagsDevOps DevOpsDays F5 Networks Edit Post
