DevOps software development philosophy helps companies produce software more rapidly, reliably, and with higher quality levels, making it more straightforward to adjust to changing customer demands and business requirements.
DevOps implementation, however, can be daunting in several respects. It requires adjustments to procedures, tools, knowledge, skills, and culture many traditional organizational silos may oppose such shifts thus raising questions as to how DevOps implementation could successfully take hold within an organization.
DevOps best practices provide guidelines you can heed to implement this philosophy successfully in an organization. Yet, every company may take different paths when embarking on its DevOps implementation journey. Our engineers shared what they had learned while moving toward DevOps approaches and listed which items are essential to make that transition successful.
What Is DevOps?
DevOps is an iterative software development methodology that integrates IT operations and development to streamline software delivery and increase speed and quality. DevOps seeks to foster an environment and culture that facilitates regular software development, testing, and release more quickly and reliably.
DevOps teams may incorporate the "shift to the left" strategy as part of their efficiency-enhancing strategies to further optimize this efficiency. The principle behind it is aimed at verifying code security and robustness early, thus expediting development processes as each step moves left, thus providing early identification and resolution of issues; such an approach has proven itself successful by significantly decreasing both time and expense spent troubleshooting/fixing problems later in the development cycle.
Read More: Maximize Efficiency: DevOps In Cloud - Boost 25% Gains!
Top Best Practices for Implementing DevOps
Integrating DevOps best practices into daily operations and realizing its full benefits have now become possible thanks to them:
Establish A Pipeline For Continuous Integration And Deployment or CI/CD
Implementation of DevOps requires setting up a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. With such an automated build, test, and deployment system, code changes can be reliably and rapidly delivered within organizations utilizing "shift-left" concepts more effectively implemented within development processes with such a pipeline in place.
Accept Agile Project Management Approaches
Scrum and Kanban are agile project management approaches that work effectively with DevOps' iterative, fast-paced nature. Organizations can utilize agile project management approaches such as Scrum or Kanban to quickly break large projects down into more manageable pieces and provide value faster to users by adopting these practices. Furthermore, agile approaches encourage regular communication among team members, enabling faster identification and resolution of any potential issues that may arise during development projects.
Practice Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is a fundamental DevOps best practice that allows businesses to track the functionality and stability of their systems in real-time, providing informed decisions regarding product direction and quickly detecting issues via gathering and analyzing development process data. By employing this technique, organizations reduce the likelihood of the problems becoming severe.
Seek Continuous Feedback
Seeking input from team members, stakeholders, and users can help an organization develop products and services with increasing relevance and quality. You can use feedback to find areas requiring improvement and identify issues to fix quickly. Continual seeking also contributes to creating a culture of cooperation and ongoing education within an organization's workforce; for instance, a DevOps engineer would likely gather such feedback during code reviews in collaboration with colleagues or stakeholders; they can hold code reviews together to assess code quality as well as spot potential problems or suggest modifications together.
Automate Routine Tasks
Automating routine tasks significantly reduces delivery time and effort, thus shortening end users' delivery timelines. Automating standard processes like code development and release, test administration, and system monitoring helps companies increase productivity while decreasing error rates and increasing system scalability and reliability, ultimately reducing delivery costs and efforts. Camil Blanaru, Site Reliability Engineer of Prezly, suggests it is common practice for developers to request various resources from DevOps teams by creating tickets and waiting for approval; this frees them up for more strategic activities while automating them effectively with tools available like Slack for quick approvals that won't cause interruptions while working.
Set Up Automated Testing
Organizations can enhance the dependability and quality of their code through test automation. Automated testing helps organizations cover test cases that might otherwise go undetected during manual testing by covering more issues with automated procedures than with manual. Increased test coverage reduces human errors and production bugs that delay the delivery time of finished products to customers, decreasing software maintenance costs by providing teams with instantaneous feedback, allowing them to focus more fully on strategic issues while freeing teams up to focus on critical initiatives like AIOps integration for improved reliance and efficiency of procedures.
Foster a Collaborative Culture
"DevOps best practices span from IaaC to container orchestration and automation to security and monitoring; however, one factor often overlooked by DevOps advocates is how important collaboration and cooperation amongst team members are."
One essential best practice of DevOps is cultivating a collaborative culture. For DevOps to work effectively, development and operations teams and other stakeholders must work closely together. By developing such an atmosphere within organizations, companies can promote open communication, shared responsibility, and a continuous improvement mindset leading to improved quality products/services as well as faster detection/fixes of problems with this support from other teams; furthermore, it also creates a happier work atmosphere which benefits both staff and company alike.
"My grandfather always told me it's better to overdo things than underdo them," recalls Miguel David, Harvest's site reliability engineer. Overcommunication came immediately to Miguel David's mind when discussing DevOps practices: this requires being proactive rather than passive when dealing with issues; creating Pull Requests that include details regarding problem solutions as well as methods chosen; writing RFCs (Request for Comments) with all teams' viewpoints collected for any proposal made; as well as maintaining clear channels of communication throughout.
Choose The Right DevOps Tools
DevOps implementation success depends heavily upon selecting appropriate DevOps tools - version control systems, code repositories, testing platforms, and deployment solutions are just a few examples of such products.
When selecting DevOps tools for use by an organization. When making this selection, organizations should keep the requirements and objectives of their DevOps practice in mind and the tasks/procedures they will use the tools for, along with user-friendliness/integration with current systems/processes/etc. In my mind. Selecting user-friendly tools that integrate well can maximize DevOps practice; doing so increases productivity while decreasing error rates/mistake rates while hastening value delivery to users/ customers alike.
FirstBlood DevOps Engineer Hekuran Sahiti notes the following when discussing DevOps best practices: "Choosing tools appropriate to your stack and minimizing custom build tools/scripts when there already exist well-known ones that do the same job are other key considerations when adopting DevOps methods; similarly self-hacked or custom tools are always detrimental when onboarding new hires and could slow their transition.
Adopt A Microservices Architecture
Organizations can increase their systems' flexibility, scalability, and resilience by adopting a microservices architecture. A microservices architecture separates applications into discrete, self-contained services that facilitate independent development, testing, and deployment, allowing faster delivery of features/functionality and easier scaling/maintenance without impacting overall system resilience and reliability. Failures within single microservices can be addressed independently. This allows organizations to enjoy increased resilience/reliability as loss is managed without affecting overall system resilience/reliability.
Improve Observability
Organizations can gain real-time insight into the behavior and performance of their systems via observability. Organizations can quickly recognize problems while making well-informed decisions regarding future products and services by collecting data from multiple sources such as logs, metrics, and traces (collectively known as the three pillars of observability) when relevant logs and metrics are shared between stakeholders, resulting in delivery of high-quality software along with prompt support services to end users.
Implement Test Automation
Let us look closely at its main components in an organized fashion:
- Efficiency through Automation: Test automation significantly boosts efficiency by automating the testing process and guaranteeing fast, consistent test execution; manual testing may take much more effort and lead to errors than its automated counterpart.
- Early Issue Detection: At an earlier point in the software development cycle, computerized tests can identify problems early. Continuous integration (CI) works seamlessly with test automation for rapid feedback on changes made to code; issues identified early are resolved quickly.
- Regression testing: Regression testing is another area where automation proves its worth, quickly verifying functionality is still present after code changes have taken effect, especially within DevOps settings where modifications occur frequently and regularly. Automated regression tests are valuable when maintaining DevOps environments where mutations occur periodically and frequently.
Conclusion
Utilizing DevOps best practices can assist companies in producing software that is more dependable, high-quality, and delivered more rapidly. This article covers several methods that you can put in place to optimize the development process while increasing customer satisfaction and business agility.
DevOps is not an exhaustive list. Individual circumstances and requirements will determine how best you implement its procedures as part of its continuous learning and improvement culture. Getting to your maximum potential with DevOps takes trial and error and perseverance if it wants to reach its true potential.
