DEVOPSdigest

Designing and deploying complete software-defined data centers (SDDCs) can be complicated because each implementation requires a broad range of infrastructure to support heavy demands for compute, networking, storage, applications and security.

Many of the problems are caused by human errors of IT managers as they develop complex multi-vendor environments spanning public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and legacy systems. Such users often have expertise with server virtualization, but they lack the deep skills to build large scale software-defined networking and storage systems – hence, the insertion of costly human mistakes.

Pensa just released a new survey of IT executives which details the current challenges of building DevOps platforms. The online survey of 200+ IT decision-makers cited limited budgets as the top barrier to DevOps success by 19.7 percent of respondents; followed closely by the constraints of legacy systems (17.2 percent); application complexity (12.8 percent); difficulty managing multiple environments (11.3 percent); and company culture (9.4 percent).

For DevOps projects underway this year, survey respondents have been mostly active on public clouds including Microsoft Azure (30.5 percent) and Amazon Web Services (26.6). However, many other teams are using virtualization platforms including VMware virtualization (19.2 percent); Microsoft virtualization (15.3 percent); and OpenStack (7.4 percent).

Fully 35 percent of respondents have been driven by a need to deploy applications once a day or several times a day; followed by those who deploy apps once a week or more (24.1 percent); once every few weeks (16.7 percent); or once a month or greater (24.2 percent).

A majority (51.7 percent) of respondents said that it takes them hours to set up infrastructure for specific applications, compared to just 11.8 percent who said it takes them minutes to spin up new application environments. Another 35.0 percent said it takes them days or even weeks to set up the needed infrastructure. As we all know, business no longer moves at the pace of days or weeks because the DevOps lifecycle involves continuous improvements for application development and deployment.