The Four Challenges of CI/CD in the Modern Enterprise

by: Chip Zoller / February 2, 2022

Older, first-generation ways of managing cloud platforms and resources tend to exacerbate challenges around Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD. They often require advanced technical administrative expertise to use, lack flexibility around orchestration, and don’t provide needed extensibility. The old way can also cause headaches around manual, labor-intensive machine builds, reactive manual isolated tests across the tech stack, and the integration and visibility problems mentioned before.

We can boil down the issues related to CI/CD challenges in the modern enterprise into four key areas.

SLOW RESOURCE PROVISIONING

It can sometimes take developers days or weeks to ready the technology stack (storage, network, hypervisor, and disaster recovery solutions among them) required for their testing environment. This causes delays in application development and deployment, leading to wasted time, resources, and much slower time-to-value.

LACK OF RELIABLE TESTING ENVIRONMENTS

When testing environments don’t meet the needs of an enterprise, they might fail for a variety of reasons. It could be because of a change of state in storage, network and server configurations, passwords, or VM (Virtual Machine) images. One test failure means the entire test process needs to be restarted; invested effort, time, and money is then wasted.

DIFFICULTY DEPLOYING AND INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGIES

As the number of apps companies use increases, so does the challenge of integrations. If you’re required to custom code each integration, your solution to this problem is far from scalable across an entire enterprise. The last thing you want is for simple updates to require maximum effort.

INCOMPLETE POST-PROVISIONING VISIBILITY

If there is no way to gain complete visibility of the various infrastructure pieces, it’s likely you’ll miss potential cost savings along the way. Blind spots in your CI/CD process could also lead to security and compliance issues as well.