DevOps & Cloud Adoption

We recently ran a survey to gauge current state of Cloud adoption and DevOps automation. While it was by no means a comprehensive survey or a large data set, it gave us the opportunity to talk to several DevOps practitioners here in the US across various verticals: media, online games, data center providers, online retailer, etc. Here is what we learnt:

• While Cloud computing is here for real, managing and containing costs is a real issue. For some businesses Cloud is still a cost-prohibitive proposition, especially when scaling up to thousands of nodes. They are perfectly comfortable running those nodes in private data centers.
• Cloud neutrality weighs in on the minds of several companies, while for some it is fait accompli to adopt the Cloud that matches their requirements (usually AWS or Azure)
• Automating their DevOps is a desirable state for all companies that are developing and deploying their own software. For smaller companies it is not that much of an issue, but for mid-sized and larger enterprises the challenges stem from deep-rooted cultural habits, organizational inertia, and lack of integration between multiple tools being used in the pipeline.
• Moving towards microservices-based architecture and Containers is very much on the radar for most organizations. Unsurprisingly, Docker and Kubernetes are the most popular Container and orchestration platforms.
• Even though our study wasn’t focusing overtly on version control, given my own background I couldn’t help noticing that close to 100% of companies that we surveyed used Git.

What challenges, if any, do you foresee in your own company for Cloud adoption and DevOps automation?