Developers love their tools. Operations teams love their tools. And security teams love their tools. As Dev, Sec, and Ops consolidate onto a single DevOps platform, toolchain technical debt becomes exponentially more costly and complex. “Tools should be in the background enabling excellent development, operations, and security practices. However, DevOps teams are often led by their tools rather than the other way around and that can hinder all aspects of the software development lifecycle (SDLC),” says Cindy Blake, CISSP, director of product and solutions marketing at GitLab. An April 2022 Gartner® report titled “Beware the DevOps Toolchain Debt Collector” notes that “many organizations find themselves with outdated, poorly governed, and unmanageable toolchains as they scale DevOps initiatives.” One of the key findings, according to Gartner, is that “most organizations create homegrown toolchains, often leveraging the tools beyond their functional design. This not only leads to a fragmented toolchain, but also creates complications when tooling needs to be scaled, replaced, or updated.” Toolchain technical debt introduces complexity as companies shift critical tasks such as reliability, governance, and compliance left in the SDLC. Discover how GitLab 15 can help your team deliver secure software, while maintaining compliance and automating manual processes. Save the date for our GitLab 15 launch event on June 23rd! No time for technical debt Few DevOps teams give toolchain upkeep the time and attention it requires. According to GitLab’s 2021 DevSecOps survey, nearly two-thirds of survey respondents, 61%, said they spend 20% or less of their time on toolchain integration and maintenance each month. “Developers face challenges and time constraints while maintaining these complex, stand-alone tool siloes, building fragility and technical debt that the [infrastructure and operations] leader has to deal with,” Gartner states. The research firm adds, “These outdated toolchains further increase overhead costs, magnify technical risks, add operational toil, and limit business agility.” Blake agrees: “Complex toolchains inhibit the ability to govern the software development and deployment process. Policies must be managed across tools and visibility into code changes and changes to its surrounding infrastructure become difficult to see and track. Time is wasted on managing the toolchain instead of value-added work.” Getting purpose-driven The remedy to toolchain sprawl and subsequent debt is to change strategy. Instead of putting energy into figuring out how to maintain one-off tools, DevOps teams should focus on how to enable processes and policies that support simplicity, control, and visibility across the SDLC. “These are the characteristics needed to meet reliability, governance, and compliance demands. A united platform like GitLab helps you do that,” Blake says. Gartner states: “Successful infrastructure and operations leaders reduce technical debt and sustainably scale DevOps toolchain initiatives across the organization by using a prioritized, iterative strategy that minimizes friction in making changes to toolchains and more quickly delivers customer value.” Adopting a purpose-built platform instead of a complex and ad-hoc toolchain also eases an organization’s ability to automate the SDLC. “Automation abstracts complexity away from the developer and provides guard rails so DevOps teams gain greater efficiency, accuracy, and consistency,” Blake says. In addition, automation reduces the audit footprint in terms of what needs oversight and inspection. Platforms also support automation throughout operations, including building and testing infrastructure as code, so that “you can eliminate the variables when you’re trying to debug an application,” she says. […]
