DevOps Scaling: 10 Challenges and Strategies to Solve Them

Scaling DevOps is the process of optimizing your DevOps workflows so they remain effective as you grow. Larger teams and projects typically have different DevOps requirements to smaller ones. As a result, most teams experiencing organic growth find they need to tune their DevOps systems along the way.

Some common DevOps scaling tasks include:

• Optimizing CI/CD pipeline performance to prevent bottlenecks
• Automating infrastructure processes to minimize provisioning delays
• Ensuring growing tool catalogues remain accessible to developers
• Monitoring and managing larger deployment fleets
• Maintaining effective governance of the DevOps lifecycle
• Finding and eliminating unnecessary costs

Successfully scaling DevOps depends on implementing the correct tools and processes to carry out these tasks. For instance, you could automate your infrastructure workflows by adopting infrastructure as code (IaC) tools. This improves DevOps scalability by reducing manual work.

Good scalability also depends on human factors such as stakeholder buy-in and the retention of experienced engineers. These issues are often overlooked, but they’re just as crucial to long-term DevOps success. Without the right people in the right places, you won’t be able to maintain your workflows at scale.

Let’s take a closer look at 10 of the biggest DevOps scalability problems and how you can resolve them. By planning for these issues within your DevOps strategy, you’ll be better equipped to keep your processes running smoothly at scale.

1. Weak standardization

DevOps workflows often depend on many different tools and processes. This makes them harder to scale because each service must be managed individually. Teams may also become siloed and find it difficult to collaborate if they’re each dependent on their own tools. Some teams could use GitHub Actions, while others opt for Azure Pipelines.

Embracing standardization is one of the easiest ways to improve DevOps scalability. Designing your workflows around a common set of solutions reduces the number of parts you need to scale. It can also improve operating efficiency and reduce unnecessary costs. 

Try building centralized internal developer platforms (IDPs) that let developers easily discover and use available tools.

2. Missing automation

Missing automation is one of the most common DevOps scalability roadblocks. Using manual tasks to launch deployments, review access requests, and approve changes impedes the natural pace of progress. 

You’ll find development velocity becomes throttled as activity increases and your team grows. To scale further, you need to hire more team members to complete the manual workflows, but this quickly becomes unsustainable.

Adopting more automated processes allows you to scale DevOps with less friction. Implementing CI/CD pipelines, IaC tools, and automated governance controls such as policy-as-code allows you to ship changes faster, with less human intervention. This increases throughput, reduces errors, and enables seamless scaling without being burdened by manual tasks.

3. Ineffective infrastructure management processes

Ineffective infrastructure management processes are one of the most common DevOps scalability blockers. If you use manual processes to provision, configure, and monitor your infrastructure, then it’s harder to manage your resources efficiently. Developers must wait before they can launch staging environments or prepare the resources that upcoming deployments need.

Infrastructure management problems can also affect scalability. 

For instance, you may need to meet new regulatory requirements as you scale. This requires clear visibility into what’s running and audit capabilities to see the history of changes. Traditional ad hoc infrastructure management doesn’t provide this level of detail.

Infrastructure management is easier, more scalable, and more powerful when it’s implemented using IaC solutions. You can combine IaC with CI/CD to fully automate your infrastructure processes. 

For true next-level infrastructure management, use an integrated platform like Spacelift to provision, configure, and govern IaC resources all in one place.

4. Cumbersome security and compliance controls

Robust security and compliance controls are a crucial part of any DevOps workflow — nobody would try to argue otherwise. 

However, poorly implemented governance systems can lead to bottlenecks that restrict scalability. For example, developers may have to wait for security teams to manually review changes, or for slow-running vulnerability scans to complete.

It might not be possible to eliminate these issues entirely, but consciously optimizing security processes can help you maintain development velocity at scale. Try using policy-as-code to automate compliance checks and reduce the workload on security teams. 

Shifting security left also aids scalability by making it less likely you’ll have to revisit security problems later in development, when they’re more costly to resolve.

5. Monolithic legacy applications

DevOps is generally discussed in the context of modern cloud-native applications, often using microservices architectures. However, in practice, many teams also rely on legacy applications. These systems may be monolithic in nature, which makes them harder to maintain and deploy.

Too many legacy apps can impact DevOps scalability. You may need separate tools and processes just to maintain your legacy services, which can reduce productivity and increase resource consumption. To resolve this issue, try modernizing your legacy apps by converting them into standalone microservices. Containerizing monoliths lets you deploy them using your existing cloud-native workflows without having to rebuild the entire application straightaway.

6. Too many microservices and distributed environments

There is a flip side to microservices: having too many can preclude effective governance at scale. 

As you launch more deployments, environments, and interlinked components, it becomes challenging to maintain your fleet and see what’s running. Changes to your DevOps workflows will affect a much larger surface area, potentially amplifying the impact of errors.

You can mitigate these effects by ensuring your microservices are covered by good observability systems. Metrics, logs, and traces allow you to see what’s happening so you can make effective decisions as you scale your DevOps systems. Many of the other best practices discussed above also apply here, such as standardizing your microservices deployment pipelines around a single automated workflow.

7. Excess costs and bill shock

Scaling up your DevOps processes generally requires new infrastructure to be provisioned with more resources. This may lead to bill shock if your infrastructure architecture is poorly optimized. Inefficiencies can also mount up at scale, triggering an unsustainable increase in costs. This compromises scalability outcomes.

For example, unexpected costs may appear if you provision new infrastructure for each staging environment. Those instances could be forgotten, causing wasteful spending, or may suffer from low utilization. 

In many cases, it’s more effective to use scalable multi-tenant platforms like Kubernetes to run multiple logical deployments within one physical environment. Use cost monitoring tools like AWS Cost Explorer and Kubecost to track your spending and identify savings opportunities.

8. Talent acquisition and retention difficulties

Scalability in DevOps isn’t just about tools and processes. Successfully implementing a DevOps strategy requires access to skilled specialists who can work across multiple technologies. Because DevOps talent is in demand, it can be challenging to hire and retain the right people.

Losing a DevOps specialist at a critical moment can therefore hinder your ability to scale up. To avoid unexpected bottlenecks, try to prioritize the retention of your DevOps staff so there’s less turnover in your teams.

Concentrating on improvements in developer experience and workload reduction strategies, such as increased use of automation, can help boost morale, encouraging employees to stick around for longer.

It’s also crucial to ensure all your processes are fully documented so newcomers can easily get started. This reduces the disruption experienced when staff turnover does occur.

9. Lack of stakeholder buy-in

It’s difficult to scale DevOps adoption throughout your organization without full buy-in from every stakeholder. Key user groups include developers, operations teams, security experts, and business leaders, but everyone participating in the project should be included. 

Without buy-in, you’re likely to face resistance as you introduce new processes intended to improve scalability.

Focus on involving all stakeholders during planning phases and sharing what’s happening and why keeps everyone informed as workflows evolve. Set clear expectations so stakeholders understand how they can contribute to successfully scaling DevOps up and out.

10. Weak feedback mechanisms

You’re unlikely to meet your DevOps scalability aims if you can’t access accurate data on what’s working. To stay ahead of scalability problems, you need to analyze the causes of detected issues and assess the results of your changes. 

Weak feedback mechanisms lead to ambiguity and doubt: Did deployment frequency increase because you scaled up your build infrastructure or because developers were working on a larger number of smaller changes?

Collect data from across the DevOps lifecycle to gain actionable insights into your scalability journey. For instance, you could measure the time taken to launch a clean environment before and after you apply optimizations, or look at the number of manual reviews completed in different time periods. This provides clear feedback that can help guide future work. Nonetheless, it’s important to analyze each metric holistically while considering the broader context that surrounds it.

The points above outline the key challenges and requirements associated with DevOps scalability. You can combine the solutions to create a cohesive scaling strategy:

1. Evaluate your current position and gain stakeholder buy-in: You should first analyze which parts of your processes are hard to scale, then ensure you have a healthy DevOps culture that’s ready to support scalability requirements.
2. Establish success criteria: Identify the metrics that will tell you when you’ve reached your scalability aims. This could be increased deployment frequency, for example, or a reduction in the number of legacy applications being maintained.
3. Introduce automated tools and processes that support scalability: Use CI/CD and IaC to automate key DevOps workflows and reduce operational overheads.
4. Analyze the effects of your changes: Use monitoring data and your success criteria to assess whether your DevOps scaling strategy is working. Collect feedback from stakeholders, then make adjustments to prioritize further scalability improvements.
5. Focus on the human factors: Maintaining DevOps scalability depends on the acquisition and retention of skilled team members, not just automated tools. You’ll struggle to sustain your progress long-term without access to specialist engineers who can maintain, optimize, and document your DevOps workflows.

Ultimately, scaling DevOps is easiest when scalability is designed in from day one. Thinking about the future while you plan your implementation allows you to optimize earlier, before any bottlenecks occur. 

Think not just of today’s requirements, but where you hope to end up over the next several years. This helps prevent scalability issues from suddenly appearing due to foreseeable capacity limits. It’s also crucial to nurture a healthy DevOps culture that supports smooth-running workflows at scale.

Choosing DevOps tools for scalability depends on how well they support automation, orchestration, and infrastructure abstraction across growing environments. Focus on tools that handle distributed systems efficiently and integrate well with CI/CD, monitoring, and IaC.

Here are some examples:

Spacelift is an IaC management platform that helps you implement DevOps best practices. Spacelift provides a dependable CI/CD layer for infrastructure tools, including OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more, letting you automate your IaC delivery workflows.

Spacelift is designed for your whole team. Everyone works in the same space, supported by robust policies that enforce access controls, security guardrails, and compliance standards. You can manage your DevOps infrastructure much more efficiently, without compromising on safety.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Book a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.

DevOps workflows can be challenging to scale. As your teams and projects grow, you’re more likely to encounter performance problems, process inefficiencies, and human concerns like staff turnover. These roadblocks may prevent you from meeting your DevOps targets.

Simply adding more resources won’t address underlying DevOps scalability issues. Every part of the DevOps lifecycle must be optimized to reduce inefficiencies and enable clear oversight. Monitoring, security, and continuous compliance become critical concerns, alongside rigorous process standardization throughout your organization.

To ensure success, it’s best to use platforms that are purpose-built for DevOps at scale. Solutions like Spacelift that natively support cross-discipline collaboration, policy-based compliance, and direct observability empower you to scale DevOps workflows with confidence. 

You can find more best practices and DevOps adoption strategies in our guides to enterprise DevOps and measuring DevOps maturity.