Since the mid-2000s, organizations have enthusiastically embraced DevOps, reaping the rewards of collaborative synergy between software development and operations teams. However, progress doesn’t come without challenges. Along their journey of digital evolution, many organizations have opted for multiple DevOps platforms. While the reasons for doing so may have been compelling at the time, they now find themselves facing a conundrum. Unknowingly, they have put their companies at risk, wasted valuable resources, and unintentionally hampered their teams’ efficiency. Read on to learn about the top 8 risks of using too many DevOps platforms.
Complexity: Every DevOps platform has its own set of features, workflows, and integrations. This makes it harder for your teams to manage and maintain your overall infrastructure. Staff will also need additional training to operate and integrate the platforms and ensure a smooth coordination between them all. In short, you create a management nightmare.
Increased Costs: From licenses and training to support, platform costs add up! Every platform comes with its own licensing or subscription fees. You may even miss out on better pricing.
Security Risks: You may not realize it, but too many DevOps platforms also makes you more vulnerable to data breaches and security risks. If you’re not careful, you could unknowingly expose your applications to vulnerabilities by using different platforms that have differing security features.
Compliance Risks: When you’re using different platforms with different protocols and practices, you make maintaining compliance with industry regulations more challenging. Each platform can have different security measures, access controls, and audit logs. It becomes harder and harder to monitor compliance across the organization.
Incompatibility / Integration Problems: Some DevOps platforms don’t play nice with others. This can make it difficult to integrate your development and deployment processes, which negates the reason why you undertook a DevOps strategy in the first place. It can waste valuable man-hours as it can lead to errors and downtime.
Fragmented Processes: Because each platform can have its own set of practices and tools, it can be a challenge to collaborate, share knowledge, and ensure efficient workflows across the organization. This wastes valuable resources and can cause frustration across all business units.
Skill Diversification & Learning Curve: If you have five different DevOps platforms, you have that many platforms to train and upskill your team on. Teams need to adapt to different tools and workflows, they need greater skill diversification and it becomes all that more difficult to build deep expertise specialization in a specific platform or toolset.
Maintenance & Support Challenges: It can be incredibly resource intensive to support multiple DevOps platforms. Updates, bug fixes, and support requests for each platform require dedicated effort and expertise. Many organizations struggle to manage it all.
No doubt, the negative implications associated with DevOps tool sprawl are real. That’s why many 0rganizations that have found themselves in the multi DevOps platforms dilemma are opting to consolidate all their platforms and having a centralized one. But what’s that process like and how do you choose the best single DevOps platform to migrate to? Read this Case Study for more answers.