8 Common DevOps Challenges in 2025 and How to Resolve Them

In this competitive world, tech giants like Amazon, Netflix, Google, Walmart, and Alibaba have marked their footprints by implementing unique strategies and methodologies. Many renowned organizations too have tried following their steps but failed to achieve their stature. Whereas following their path is not enough, implementing their digital strategy can surely give you an edge in the market.

So, now you must be wondering what is the common factor that sets them apart? Well, the big organizations (as mentioned above) follow a common methodology known as DevOps.

In the last few years, DevOps has gained a huge appreciation from the IT industry. Professional experts have moved forward to implement it within their organization, leaving behind traditional methods and working towards an automated synced world.

Albeit, any organization may encounter questions like, “Where and how do we start with DevOps implementation services?”, “What challenges we might face?” and “How do we resolve those challenges?

And so, the question arises - why is DevOps implementation still a challenging task for some organizations despite its growing popularity?

Now is the time to look at some of the challenges organizations face during DevOps implementation, along with solutions that just might help shape your own DevOps methodology.

Let's start by going through the significance of DevOps and its benefits before we get into the challenging part!

Why is DevOps So Important?

DevOps is the pinnacle that every team has been trying hard to reach as organizations shift their paradigm from traditional approaches (waterfall model) to iterative, Agile and DevOps methods.

The global DevOps market is estimated to generate USD $57.90 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 24.2% from 2021.

DevOps shifts the focus from development to delivery, which is a minor but crucial distinction. But more than the technical part, DevOps is more about a cultural shift; a development mindset that emphasizes teamwork and open communication before anything else.

In simple words, it’s about simplifying complex manual processes into a fine-tuned methodology that involves speed, drastically reduced human errors, improved scalability, and better productivity.

In general, DevOps architecture, if deployed properly, can have a significant influence on your business by enhancing efficiency and streamlining crucial but rather unglamorous areas.

Top DevOps Challenges 2025 and How to Solve Them

DevOps is simple and implementing it is not. With the rising popularity of this approach, organizations are rushing to integrate Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Docker but are hardly seeing the actual problem. Using only modern automated tools and training your workforce on how to use them have nothing to do with DevOps success.

Instead, the biggest obstacles are not knowing what could possibly turn out to be challenges and how to mitigate them.

With that being in mind, let’s walk through the top DevOps challenges and solutions and discover how to straighten them out.

Here we go!

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DevOps Challenge: Inconsistent Environment

When the codebase moves within different teams during the phases of the software development lifecycle, it is a time-consuming process as all the environments utilized in the process are configured differently. Therefore, it’s quite difficult for the software to perform consistently across multiple platforms wiring in various environments.

As a result, every team member wastes their time trying to resolve issues without realizing that the problem is not with the code but with the environment. Hence, one of the greatest killers of agility and smooth transition is an inconsistent environment.

Solution

To overcome such technical challenges in DevOps, we have to ensure that all environments are identical by developing infrastructure blueprints and implementing Continuous Delivery (CD). However, the involved team should draw a common blueprint for executing the DevOps process and introduce continuous delivery to sail through the same boat.

DevOps Challenge: Manual Testing and Deployment

When we talk about the development process, manual intervention is not advisable for the testing and deployment phases. It significantly affects efficiency, consumes time, and reduces accuracy. Human errors and non-repeatable procedures are the results of manual intervention. If we perform manual testing, it’s not possible to implement CI/CD pipelines in an agile way. Furthermore, manual testing increases the chance of product defects, resulting in unplanned efforts.

When the deployment is done manually, the probability of failure increases significantly, lowering quality and reliability while increasing unplanned efforts.

Solution

You can solve DevOps challenges related to manual testing and deployment by automating the framework and deployment processes and, thus, improving the entire process and strategy. Every DevOps-aspiring organization should think about including automatic testing procedures in the deployment process. As a result, they will be able to reduce deployment failures.

DevOps Challenge: Incompetence in DevOps and SDLC

The efficiency of SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) creates a direct impact on software delivery and deployment. By implementing a systematic and logical SDLC, an organization should be able to deliver high-quality and reliable software in a given time. However, for decades, the software development industry has struggled with SDLC maturity.

In the era of DevOps, where software is provided in shorter increments with a high degree of reliability and quality, having a mature process is even more crucial for a team. But some organizations are not able to move further with the agility of DevOps. In fact, most of these organizations are either immature in the process or wrongly assume that they already know everything.

Solution

Organizations should follow the path to implement cutting-edge DevOps tools and technologies. In addition, they also should help their teams learn the newly-adapted technologies and imbibe them with proper training.

Teams should continuously seek feedback on a regular basis, and they should strive to improve it. Investing all of your time and money into all-in-one solutions can make it easier for teams to deploy DevOps, allowing them to deliver features faster and with fewer failures.

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DevOps Issue: Traditional Change Management Methods

Many organizations have been using traditional change management practices for years and are comfortable with them. The majority of their process was developed at a time when change management meant employing and deploying extra resources.

Now, coming back to the recent scenario, applications now consist of many small components or microservices that can be easily modified and deployed. Now, suddenly, the process gets in the way.

In this ever-changing environment, you have to be proactive for immediate changes and deployment. Sometimes, teams must go through several security reviews, operations, and code reviews. But what sets you back is that there is often a huge line to wait for reviews, which causes review processes to be pushed back another week.

Solution

Organizations should become more agile and try to shift their paradigm from the traditional approach. For example, instead of authority, embrace autonomy for rapid decision-making or make sure to release changes from the very beginning of the development life cycle.

Additionally, you can always prepare for failures and minimize the negative impact of change as part of the overall DevOps adoption challenges. Soaking all your code changes in an independent environment and deploying them in stages is a good practice in this regard.

DevOps Challenge: Tool Integration from Different Domains

In DevOps integration, all the required processes, such as development, testing, and deployment, must be in a continuous and iterative loop. Well, it’s not easy to tie all the team members in one place as they are from different departments. This will affect productivity when one department has to transfer work to another with an entirely different set of tools and technologies.

Solution

The automation process will surely reduce all those time-consuming, repetitive tasks such as analytical, data entry, and product research. This way, an organization can enhance its outreach and efficiency.

This brings up two major benefits, such as:

• It will help Dev (development) and Ops (operations) teams to enhance communication and transparency.
• It streamlines the entire development life cycle by combining various departmental processes into one.

DevOps Challenge: Poor Access Control and Secrets Management

For the higher quality development process and product deployment, tight access controls and secrets management are essential factors. Secrets may consist of API tokens, account-sensitive information and credentials, SSH Keys, etc. So, many entities like employees, services, and containers use these.

Henceforth, these passwords and keys are poorly managed and become easy targets for hackers. Furthermore, DevOps teams often allow unrestricted access to privileged accounts such as admin, root and others to guarantee a smooth and speedy workflow.

Solution

In order to avoid such DevOps challenges, the passwords, keys, and other critical account information must be carefully controlled. DevOps teams have resorted to inadequate secrets management, such as storing passwords in containers with the adoption of automated deployment.

With the rapid growth of automated deployments, teams often choose the path that may lead to leaving their passwords and keys exposed.

Hence, you should remove sensitive information like credentials, services, accounts, files, etc., for successful DevOps secrets management. In addition, while not using it, passwords from the code should be removed and stored in a centralized container.

To implement this data storing method, you can use different products like Azure key vault, AWS secrets manager, CyberArk, Thycotic Secret Server, and many more.

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DevOps Issue: Obsolete Development Practices

Outdated development practices come next in our list of DevOps challenges and solutions. In most organizations, teams dedicatedly perform specific operations like testing the applications. These teams are not active or involved with other departments.

So, the only way of having a collaboration between them is a never-ending cycle of code sent out for testing and then returned. The QA team finds bugs and issues during this process and sends them back to developers. Then, the team of developers works to resolve and redeploy the code.

Since it’s an endless process, the teams come to the same table to agree on what bugs they can tolerate and promote to production. They add more technical debt into the system with every release, reducing its quality and stability and increasing unplanned work.

Solution

It's preferable to prevent bugs from progressing through the development process. This is accomplished by developing automated test harnesses and automatically failing the build if any of the tests fail. This procedure has been developed with Continuous Integration (CI) in mind. So, testing should be done as part of the development process.

DevOps Challenge: Incentive-Driven Approach

Development teams work towards enhancing time to market, whereas, the operations team ensures security, reliability, availability, and governance. Although this barrier appears to be unrelated to the topic, it significantly impacts DevOps procedures. The most common organizational approach is for every team to focus on its own benefits rather than having a shared goal of customer satisfaction.

There will be an endless debate between priorities and resources if every team doesn’t follow the same goal. If this trend continues, every DevOps process will be an unresolved mystery for the rest of the time.

Solution

With the organization's best approach in mind, management should consider rearranging employee incentives to mitigate these DevOps challenges. Everyone should measure achievement in such a way that those incentives are reinforced. It's a winning proposition for everyone, particularly the customer.

How to Adopt DevOps?

Since the inception of DevOps, tech giants from all over the world have been experimenting and researching a range of strategies and techniques to incorporate this approach into their ecosystems. Some of them have succeeded in creating a foundation for DevOps deployment, while others have failed. DevOps implementation, however, continues to be challenging and hinders IT companies to from fully benefiting from it.

So, in addition to all the DevOps challenges and solutions mentioned above, let’s explore some of the best practices you need to follow to ensure a successful DevOps adoption.

Embrace a DevOps Mindset

You don't just say, "Let's integrate DevOps," and start throwing tools around. In addition to having a thorough understanding of what DevOps is and the unique business demands it will address, your entire organization must be willing to change the way things have always been done. DevOps calls for a total organizational change in terms of how you work and how you experiment with innovation.

Define Your Requirements

DevOps has no "one-size-fits-all" solution. You cannot just expect success by adding an automated tool or hiring a DevOps engineer." Every organization will go through a different DevOps journey that aligns with its mission and vision. And this journey will focus much more on transforming the communicative and collaborative styles of the people involved than it will on the tools that enable automation.

Create a DevOps Roadmap

To bring teams together in a collaborative environment, organizations must create a shared goal so that each team member feels a feeling of duty and obligation. DevOps largely relies on modern practices that encourage new methods for software architecture, development, testing, and deployment while fostering teamwork.

In general, helping the team as a whole perform its task to the best of its ability and supporting the continuous deployment of production-ready processes should be the two main goals of your DevOps roadmap.

Select the Right DevOps Tools

One single tool cannot fulfill all of the requirements and goals of your DevOps initiative. The best strategy is to choose a set of tools that are perfect for the organization's software delivery environment, applications, and teams.

The right tools offer seamless process execution, help in resource and cost optimization, enable firms to construct a strong DevOps architecture, and achieve a continuous process from development to delivery.

Focus on Quality Assurance

Since testers in most businesses receive the least time for quality assurance, the quality of the product gradually degrades. When an organization struggles with DevOps adoption challenges, they frequently concentrate its efforts on automating deployments while ignoring the requirements of QA.

Even though DevOps makes it impossible to fully automate testing, you can speed up these processes by automating at least some nonfunctional and functional tests related to performance, security, and other quality attributes. Run extensive, lengthy tests that call for huge, production-like environments in your DevOps process to avoid slow feedback cycles.

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Solving the Challenges of DevOps with RadixwebDevOps has become a tried-and-true methodology by offering efficient solutions resulting in quick delivery, team collaboration, and Agile development. Therefore, DevOps implementation is a long-term commitment to ensuring that security and quality are integrated at the very core of the system and run throughout the product development lifecycle. Integration DevOps will also protect the code from data leaks and cybersecurity threats.Many organizations have implemented DevOps to some extent, but only a few of them use it company-wide. If your organization plans to implement and scale DevOps successfully, resolving these challenges is crucial.And if your organization is facing such challenges in DevOps implementation, make sure to reach out to our experts for DevOps consulting services.