DevOps is a rigorous approach to establishing a collaborative culture and environment in organizations, where Software Development(Dev) & Operations(Ops) work together.
This collaboration enables enterprise teams to improve software delivery and provide a higher quality of service.
As the scope of DevOps extends to the delivery of a complete service (including user support, training, and consulting services), it is necessary to understand DevOps best practices that can help you efficiently accomplish your operational objectives.
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Table of Contents
What is DevOps?
In 2007, a software development and IT operations community was frustrated by the silo-ing of the roles in their industry—where developers worked away from operations, which meant that there was little feedback about how code was performing when it was deployed to customers—formed the DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that encourages close cooperation and communication between software developers and IT operations teams.
How important is DevOps?
There’s a great deal of DevOps adoption going on in the world right now. IDC predicts that the DevOps software market will grow to $6.6 billion by 2022—up from $2.9 billion in 2017.
The driving forces behind this trend include enterprise investments in software-driven innovation, adoption of microservices-based architectures, and increased investment by CTOs and CEOs in collaborative and automated application development processes.
The DevOps Trends survey showed that 99 percent of IT professionals agreed that DevOps positively impacted their organization, even though implementing it required an overhaul of business structures and processes.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps combines creative technology, teamwork, and communication like many other IT-related fields.
For instance, developers might write unit tests as part of their daily activities. But DevOps can help optimize this process: If DevOps is in place, sysadmins can fix some of the flaws detected during the deployment process.
Following the integration of DevOps into business operations, here are the benefits your company will reap:
1. Faster deployment
If you want to keep your customers happy, you will need to deploy releases more frequently. This will also make it easier for you to stay competitive.
2. Quality product
When development and operation teams work together and frequently talk to end-users, the resulting product is of much higher quality.
3. Promotes agility
DevOps can help you stay ahead of the curve by making your business more efficient and scalable.
4. Reliable problem solving
DevOps software management is an approach to ensure a quick and stable response to technical or operational problems in your software.
5. Minimum cost of production
DevOps can help you reduce the costs of running your operation by providing a streamlined way to produce and maintain new features and updates.
DevOps best practices to follow
1. Agile project management
Agile Project Management and Software Development is a method in which a project delivers valuable software to clients in short iterations (or cycles), each time producing better results than the last time.
The system effectively uses feedback from the client while also utilizing regular and frequent communication between the client and the team.
Here are some of the ideas essential to agile project management:
If you’re ready to take on your next big project, you can use some tricks from agile management to handle the scope. Learn how agile works with larger projects and how it helps you build a bigger picture of the project as you go.
Scrum and kanban are standard project management methods for agile teams. They allow development teams to plan, track, and deliver incremental work quickly.
2. Build a collaborative culture
DevOps is about improving collaboration and eliminating silos between development, operations, and quality assurance teams. It helps everyone involved in software creation ship the product faster.
To achieve this goal, you need to foster a culture of communication and collaboration within your team and a shared goal.
Both developers and operations engineers must learn to share the responsibility of delivering software while focusing on the customer experience.
DevOps is a culture whereby everyone learns to take the quality of the product into their own hands, regardless of their role in the company.
3. Build with the right tools
Automation is critical to DevOps success. Achieving automation requires collaboration by developers and operations staff.
However, developers and operations engineers collaborate in DevOps environments to create a holistic automation framework to design, test, and deliver software that makes everyone’s life easier.
The right DevOps tools can help you record your performance metrics, send out warnings when things go wrong, and give you a broad view of your software development lifecycle.
4. Shift left with CI/CD
When DevOps teams use “shift left” approaches, they introduce their testing processes into the early development stages of their code.
This is helpful because it allows developers to correct errors or improve the quality of their code while they are working on that area of the codebase instead of having to submit numerous changes to a separate test team.
The idea behind the shift-left approach is to make testing and quality assurance more frequent and earlier in the development cycle. This can increase the team’s efficiency by bringing teams closer together and working more collaboratively.
Because the BA and development teams work closely when selecting stories for a release, everyone involved feels they have a stake in the project’s success.
5. Monitor the right metrics
In DevOps, continuous performance monitoring is a very effective methodology for ensuring that the best practices are in place.
Suppose you measure relevant metrics, such as activity level, remaining work, lead time, mean time to find defects, and issue severity. In that case, you can determine whether a DevOps implementation is succeeding or not.
It is essential to monitor the data because it may help you spot problems early and recover quickly. The DevOps metrics are designed to determine the goals and expectations of your company.
Using DevOps, you can vouch for the right indicators, such as team velocity, success factors, unit cost, relevant profitability, total involved cost, and other development team challenges.
6. Switch to microservices
Microservices architecture is a way of building a single application as a set of small services—each serving a particular purpose. Unlike monolithic architectures, the modular approach separates functions into distinct programs.
When you adopt a microservices architecture, you build individual applications as small services that communicate through an application programming interface (API).
In the DevOps approach, projects are split into microservices or smaller programs that perform a small part of a more extensive service. These individual programs can all be worked on simultaneously, changing one without affecting others.
Microservices also help with other DevOps practices, such as continuous integration and delivery.
7. Implement automation
Automation is an integral part of the DevOps development process and its best practices. Companies usually rely on manual testing methods to test the applications regularly. But when you use DevOps automation testing, the process becomes more straightforward and efficient.
Automated testing can shorten software development lifecycles and make them more effective. Testing automation software is created to avoid the need for testers to repeat routine test operations, which frees them up to be more productive.
Developers can also automate performance monitoring tasks and infrastructure configuration management, encouraging them to identify and fix problems early. Automation tools allow testing teams to choose the best strategies for their own needs.
8. Continuous security
When DevOps is used in businesses, its consistency gives it advantages over other technology environments in terms of security.
For example, security tools are integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. So the controls of DevOps don’t hinder the Agility and smoothness that DevOps supports.
Building software is often faster and less costly with machines or computers. The Intellectual Property created by the devices will be in safer hands based on the credential verification and security measures you put in place. You can also add as many layers of security as you want to secure information.
9. Continuous feedback
DevOps practitioners use continuous feedback to ensure that team members understand what tasks they need to complete. If anything is faulty, it is quickly and promptly communicated to the development, test, and operation teams.
It also means that the team members will get frequent, early notification of build, integration, and test results. This ensures that they will identify and correct problems as quickly as possible.
This development sprint is created because the DevOps process allows continuous feedback, leading to fast and high-quality delivery.
10. Adopt continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous integration is a DevOps protocol for integrating code changes from different contributors into a central repository. This protocol allows developers to merge code changes frequently and use automated tools to test the code’s correctness.
You can even use a version control system to check in small chunks of code as you work, which can help you detect errors early.
Continuous delivery is a phase in the DevOps process that gets code from continuous integration into production.
Continuous delivery makes it easy to launch software changes with confidence, knowing that you can easily roll back if needed. This makes it possible for even the largest deployments as recurring events happen on demand.
To wrap up things
Most of the businesses in the market have started adopting the DevOps approach for automating and streamlining their operations.
This helps in improving the process and delivering quality products on time. However, the DevOps approach is all about using some of the best practices to let your developers, testers, and QA professionals work together seamlessly during all stages of building, testing, and deploying an application or app.
