Five Challenges of Migrating to DevOps Drupal Production Environment

The Drupal production environment is where the latest versions of Drupal products or updates are pushed live to the intended users. Think of it as a final phase of production.

It is the environment where the end-user can see, experience, and interact with Drupal’s new version. All testing is completed before this point, and all bugs are squashed.

Whereas a development environment may contain several different versions or updates being worked on and tested, the Drupal production environment has just the final version of the product to avoid any confusion or security vulnerabilities.

Why Do We Need to Adopt DevOps?

Deploying your Drupal website to production requires some planning and time. It can take hours, days, weeks, months or even years. You need to understand the problem you need to solve, plan the architecture, decide on the best tools, write the code and resolve the bugs. At the end of this cycle is the deployment process, which can be time and effort demanding and frustrating.

Therefore, eliminating these troubles can go a long way in freeing up time for actual software development. It is what automated deployment does; it ensures that you only have to deal with setting up the deployment process once. After that, the computer handles future deployments, so you can place greater focus on producing quality code. To make the process automated and a lot easier, we include DevOps in Drupal Production Environment, but it comes with its own set of challenges.1 We’ll discuss it today. 

Five Challenges While Adopting DevOps in Drupal Production Environment.

1. Inadequate Attention to Customer Needs

Often, people-related factors are a source of more significant challenges than those directly connected with technologies. DevOps in Drupal Production Environment has the means to automate various parts of the software development lifecycle, which closely echoes one of the DevOps goals - boosting the team’s efficiency.2

However, the DevOps operations must be implemented with the customer in mind; they have to be grounded in customer value. Use the value of DevOps to improve customer experience.

Innovative solutions require continuous communication. Effective communication is the epitome of DevOps.

2. Issues with the Standards and Metrics

Dev and Ops departments have different goals and working systems. Hence, they have different toolsets as well. It might become very tedious to sit together in a production environment and integrate the tools.

Under such circumstances, all the involved teams should agree upon a commonly decided metric system.

3. Resistance to Change

Everyone may not welcome DevOps deployment, in some cases even perceiving DevOps to be their replacement. Employees must be made to realise that they are the driving force in the journey to DevOps, which is designed to make organisations more competitive. A smooth and gradual move to DevOps will enable everyone to become accustomed to the DevOps culture and contribute to its development process.

A great starting point for Drupal Production Environment must be:

• leaving the comfort zone, 
• understanding the roles and responsibilities of where dev stops and ops currently start, and 
• how these can be integrated best. 

It’s often the first hurdle to overcome as it adopts DevOps practices. By getting everyone to work together as a dedicated team, an organisation can realise its DevOps objectives and move ahead of the competition at a faster rate.

4. Integrating Tools of Different Domains

We all know that continuous integration is one of the significant pillars of DevOps, so when it comes to Drupal Production Environment, we need to integrate all the tools properly to make testing, deployment, and building work together continuously. The major challenge is making all the tools work collaboratively to ensure a smooth integration.

5. Managing Multiple Environments

As the Drupal production complexity increases, it needs more separate app development, staging, test, and production environments.3

Managing multiple environments is complex and could quickly go out of control. It requires experienced DevOps experts to define the series of predetermined steps to speed up deployment by streamlining development and testing. Identifying and synchronising any difference between the two toolsets for Development and Operations Teams is the most significant part of making everything work properly.