12 Biggest DevOps Challenges in 2025 (and How to Fix Them)

DevOps adoption process inevitably brings change, and change often brings some level of pushback. Team members accustomed to established ways of working may hesitate or even resist altering their routines. 

For many, familiar habits and long-standing processes feel safer and more efficient than learning and adapting to new tools, workflows, and approaches. This hesitation is natural, but it can slow down adoption efforts if not managed carefully.

Beyond individual resistance, the shift can also create a kind of cultural shock within the organization. When responsibilities and roles aren’t clearly defined during the transition, misunderstandings can arise, sometimes leading to tension between teams.

Solution

Cultural resistance is best addressed by clearly communicating what’s changing and why. If team members understand the causes of development problems and how DevOps is expected to solve them, they’ll be more likely to support potentially disruptive changes.

It’s equally important to involve all stakeholders during the planning stages. Giving everyone a chance to contribute not only ensures that the solution meets the needs of the whole team but also helps DevOps practices take root naturally. Instead of being forced onto a hesitant team, the culture grows organically through shared ownership and collaboration.

Using DevOps to integrate development and operations workflows is a step towards improving your security posture. It allows you to ensure release integrity, standardize threat detection, and align how different teams work. 

But these outcomes aren’t guaranteed: DevOps can also increase your attack surface as you adopt new tools and platforms, while opening processes to more stakeholders may expose new types of risk. Your DevOps strategy must address these issues to keep your users and workloads protected.

Solution

Enhance DevOps security by treating it as a crucial third pillar in your strategy, alongside development and operations. Use the DevSecOps model to deeply integrate security tools and best practices with your broader DevOps workflows, from planning through to deployment. 

One of the key principles here is “shifting left,” which brings security tasks into the earlier phases of your process instead of leaving them for the end. Doing so not only helps identify potential vulnerabilities sooner but also ensures that protection is continuous throughout the entire software delivery lifecycle. 

In practice, this approach minimizes risks, reduces costly rework, and creates a stronger culture of accountability where development, operations, and security teams are aligned on a common goal: delivering reliable, resilient, and secure software at speed.

AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure? Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible? DevOps teams have hundreds of tools and services to choose from, each with unique benefits and drawbacks. This choice is one of the DevOps ecosystem’s greatest strengths, but it can be paralyzing when putting together a new strategy.

Choosing the right tools isn’t just about ticking boxes. You need solutions that work well together, streamline the developer experience, and fit your budget. The wrong choices can slow teams down, create unnecessary complexity, or drive up costs when tools are duplicated, underutilized, or forgotten. 

Making smart, intentional decisions early on can mean the difference between a highly productive DevOps environment and one weighed down by inefficiency.

Solution

When choosing tools, follow a clear evaluation process. Start by defining selection criteria for each category, then carefully compare your options against those requirements. Resist the urge to pick tools just because they’re new or popular. A toolchain built around the needs of your stakeholders is far likelier to set you up for long-term success.

Read more: 73 Most Useful DevOps Tools to Use in 2025

DevOps exists to streamline the software delivery process, yet developers often struggle to utilize the new tools and systems it introduces. This can be due to inconvenient interfaces, incorrect access controls, or missing documentation. 

These barriers often obstruct routine but essential tasks, such as gathering infrastructure logs, provisioning new environments, or reviewing test results from CI/CD pipelines. When teams are forced to spend time wrestling with these hurdles, their ability to move quickly and iterate effectively is limited. 

Solution

You can remove these roadblocks by first ensuring all developers are informed which tools are available and how they can be accessed. Then, use wikis and centralized knowledge bases to share documentation and ensure it stays updated. 

To remove friction from developer workflows, try using platform engineering to build an internal developer platform (IDP) that lets developers access all their tools in one place.

DevOps is designed to bring consistency and speed to the lifecycle, but because it touches so many interconnected systems, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s happening. 

Each step from code commits and repository-level development stats to automated testing pipelines and real-time deployment health needs to be carefully monitored. Without this visibility, diagnosing issues or spotting areas for improvement becomes guesswork.

A strong monitoring and observability strategy not only helps you identify problems early but also gives you the insights needed to make informed, data-driven decisions. This level of transparency supports stable application performance, helps your systems scale effectively as demand grows, and ensures that security isn’t compromised along the way. 

Solution

Eliminate monitoring blind spots by choosing tools designed to meet observability requirements. Ensuring your tools and processes support metrics instrumentation lets you automate data collection from your workflows. 

For instance, Spacelift lets you see all the infrastructure deployed across your cloud accounts, while solutions like Kube-Prometheus-Stack provide detailed visibility for your Kubernetes clusters. Use standards such as DORA to track DevOps productivity and see how it changes over time.

Effective governance controls are essential for maintaining safety and security within DevOps practices. When configured properly, they help ensure that systems remain resilient while still allowing teams to move quickly. 

Striking the right balance is key: Developers need the freedom to innovate and deliver value, but organizations also need safeguards that prevent unauthorized or harmful activity.

Poorly designed governance can lead to serious risks such as security vulnerabilities, data breaches, or even costly regulatory penalties. On the other hand, overly rigid checks and restrictions can stifle productivity and slow down development, making it difficult for teams to meet their goals. 

This constant tension between enabling speed and ensuring control is what makes governance one of the top DevOps challenges.

Solution

Orchestrate your governance checks so they’re fast, continual, and run without any developer intervention. Use policy-as-code systems like Open Policy Agent (OPA) and HashiCorp Sentinel to bake compliance policies into your deployment processes. Combine policy as code with CI/CD to test changes against your policies as soon as they’re committed. 

OPA is integrated into the Spacelift platform. You can define policies for different purposes – find the schema for the input for each type of policy in the Spacelift documentation.

Beyond compliance policies, DevOps governance also depends on correct access controls and clear auditability. Use RBAC and centralized identity management solutions to prevent unauthorized access that could affect the integrity of your processes. 

Choose auditable tools that log each action and event so there’s a trail to follow during incident investigations.

Lack of effective cost monitoring can easily lead to DevOps budget breaches at scale. Spending on infrastructure resources, tool licenses, and support agreements soon stacks up.

Self-service infrastructure access and on-demand environment provisioning can worsen the issue by preventing you from accurately forecasting your future spend. If those environments are then forgotten, you could end up wasting your budget on redundant resources. This negates the benefits of any development efficiency improvements.

Solution

Use centralized cost monitoring platforms to gain visibility into the costs associated with each part of your DevOps stack:

• Cloud provider services such as AWS Cost Explorer and Google Cloud Cost Manager are good starting points for monitoring your cloud infrastructure. 
• Kubecost is a popular option for Kubernetes cost optimization. 
• Infracost is another leading solution for IaC workflows.

DevOps is designed to streamline and accelerate the software development and deployment process, helping teams release features faster and with greater reliability. However, when workflows are not carefully optimized, they can introduce unnecessary friction that actually slows developers down instead of empowering them. 

A frequent pain point is long-running CI/CD pipelines. When build, test, or deployment steps drag on for too long, developers are left waiting around to see whether their changes passed or if they need to make adjustments. This delay disrupts their flow and can also pile up frustration across the team.

Eliminating these issues allows the DevOps loop to run as a smooth cycle of small changes.

Solution

Eliminate DevOps bottlenecks by refining CI/CD pipeline implementations, fully automating your workflows, and optimizing critical feedback loops so they complete as quickly as possible. Ensuring developers can run unit tests locally, for example, allows quicker iteration outside CI/CD.

Furthermore, you can minimize the number of context switches required to perform key tasks by giving developers direct access to feedback while they work, such as within their IDE or terminal. 

As organizations grow, DevOps performance and reliability often face new challenges. What once worked seamlessly with a smaller team and fewer deployments can quickly begin to strain under the weight of larger teams and more frequent release cycles. Systems that performed well in the early days may struggle to keep up with the increased demand and complexity. 

Over time, this can lead to issues such as slower application performance, difficulties in managing and coordinating tasks across teams, or even significant cost overruns. A lack of proactive planning and scalable processes compounds these challenges, making it harder to maintain the speed, efficiency, and reliability that modern DevOps practices require.

Solution

Where possible, it’s best to plan for scalability from the start. Map out where you hope to be in the next one, two, or five years, and design your DevOps workflows accordingly. 

Of course, no one can anticipate every challenge in advance. That’s why it’s equally important to establish regular reviews of your monitoring and performance data. By keeping a close eye on real-world usage, you can spot potential bottlenecks early, before they evolve into costly or disruptive problems. 

Platforms like Spacelift can play a key role in this effort by helping teams manage infrastructure at scale with greater efficiency and control. By automating workflows, improving visibility, and reducing the friction of day-to-day operations, Spacelift gives teams the flexibility to grow without sacrificing reliability or performance.

With so many possible measurements, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, change failure rate, and more, it’s easy to focus on vanity metrics that don’t provide meaningful insights. 

Teams may track numbers that look good in dashboards but fail to highlight bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or areas of risk. This misalignment can lead to wasted effort and a false sense of progress.

Solution

Instead of measuring for the sake of visibility, focus on metrics that answer key questions: How quickly can we deliver value to customers? How reliable are our releases? How resilient is our system under failure? 

Frameworks like the DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recovery, and Change Failure Rate) are widely adopted because they balance speed with stability.

By selecting metrics that reflect both technical efficiency and customer value, teams gain actionable insights that drive improvement. These metrics should not be used as a tool for punishment or comparison between teams, but as a way to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Skill shortages in the DevOps space have become a pressing challenge for many organizations. As businesses accelerate their digital transformation efforts, the demand for engineers who can manage complex cloud infrastructures, automate deployments, and ensure continuous delivery has skyrocketed. 

Unfortunately, the supply of professionals with the right combination of technical expertise, problem-solving abilities, and cross-functional collaboration skills has not kept pace. This mismatch often results in delays, higher costs, and increased burnout for existing teams who are expected to shoulder more responsibilities than ever before.

Solution

The most effective way to address these shortages is to invest in the continuous upskilling of DevOps professionals. Organizations can create structured learning pathways that cover not only emerging tools and technologies but also best practices in security, automation, and collaboration. 

Encouraging hands-on experimentation with sandbox environments, sponsoring certifications, and supporting attendance at industry conferences or workshops can help keep teams at the cutting edge.

At its core, DevOps is more than just a set of practices or tools — it’s a cultural movement that puts people at the center. Too often, organizations run into challenges because they focus heavily on implementing the latest tools and technical systems, while overlooking the human aspects that make development workflows truly effective. 

Of course, tools are important; they provide the structure and support needed to keep things running. But real, lasting success in DevOps initiatives comes from streamlining processes at a higher level, ensuring they’re simple, collaborative, and efficient.

This people-first approach means directly engaging with stakeholders, actively listening to their needs, and translating those insights into scalable solutions. By doing so, teams can reduce friction, adapt more quickly, and accelerate iteration throughout the DevOps lifecycle.

Solution

Make DevOps more human-oriented by strategically identifying inefficiencies in your current development processes. Different stakeholders should be encouraged to collaborate so they can better understand each other’s workflows. 

Instead of reshaping your organization around DevOps, recognize that good DevOps implementations evolve organically from within their parent organizations. Once you’ve established your core workflows, you can use new tools and automated processes to refine them.

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 commonly fail due to unforeseen challenges. Whether you experience performance bottlenecks at scale or developers struggle to find available tools and processes, it’s important to plan for these problems as you implement DevOps within your teams.

These DevOps challenges can feel intimidating, but planning for them upfront makes it easier to implement effective workarounds. For instance, IaC, IDPs, and CI/CD help reduce developer access friction, while centralized observability suites enable efficient monitoring of security vulnerabilities and budget overruns.

You can learn more about building a DevOps strategy in our DevOps implementation guide. It outlines six key steps that produce successful DevOps workflows while avoiding common problems. We also have dedicated round-ups of DevOps best practices for startups and enterprises to give you the right guidance for your scenario.

Frequently asked questions

How to overcome DevOps challenges?

To overcome DevOps challenges, you should align on culture, automate effectively, and adopt clear monitoring and feedback loops. Consistent DevOps success relies on iterative improvement and strong cross-functional communication. Without organizational alignment, even well-designed tools and workflows fail to deliver the expected benefits.

What is the hardest part of DevOps?

The hardest part of DevOps is driving cultural and organizational change across teams. Aligning development, operations, and security under shared goals requires shifting long-standing workflows, responsibilities, and mindsets.

Why is DevOps so stressful?

DevOps is often stressful due to its high responsibility, constant context switching, and the need for rapid incident response. The role sits at the intersection of development, operations, and security, making it a critical point of failure when issues arise.

Is DevOps still relevant in 2025?

Yes, DevOps remains highly relevant in 2025 as a foundational approach for modern software delivery and infrastructure management. DevOps is now often part of a broader engineering ecosystem, coexisting with platform engineering, SRE, cloud-native development, and infrastructure as code. Its continued relevance lies in its adaptability to new technologies and development models.