DevOps Best Practices

Success in the implementation of DevOps relies on adopting core practices that have been presented and successful in many organizations across industries. DevOps best practices are centered on removing silos, improving communications, and handling processes and practices for software delivery.

CI/CD is the foundation of DevOps practices, which automate code change integration and delivery of applications to production environments. This practice ensures that code is merged together, tested, and deployed as regularly as possible, thus reducing integration difficulties and improving time to market.

To implement CI/CD, you want to automate build processes to verify code changes, automatically deploy to testing and production environments, run automated tests for code issues as early as possible, and maintain deployment pipelines to provide visibility to user stakeholders into the process. Organizations that seek expertise in this area often partner with providers of devops development and consulting services to accelerate their implementation. Organizations that effectively implemented CI/CD functions reported a 74% reduction in lead time for changes and a a 44% improvement in frequency of deployments.

Infrastructure as Code is a fundamental DevOps practice that allows teams to manage and provision infrastructure using code instead of manual processes, creating consistency, reproducibility, and version control for infrastructure management. Companies that want to optimize their infrastructure often partner with providers of infrastructure management services to ensure best practices are followed.

The key benefits of IaC are consistent environments across development, testing, and production; minimized configuration drift and environment-related issues; version control for changes to the infrastructure; and quicker recovery if failures occur. The best practices for Cloud DevOps especially highlight IaC as a way for organizations to fully take advantage of cloud scalability and flexibility while maintaining control and visibility. 

Quality assurance automation is another essential DevOps best practice to ensure software reliability while maintaining development speed. Effective DevOps is done by introducing many types of testing throughout the software development pipeline.

Good testing practices include unit testing to validate that individual components are functioning correctly, integration testing to validate that components work together; performance testing to validate that the system behaves as expected under a load; and security testing, which is a practice of identifying vulnerabilities as early as possible in the development pipeline. Organizations with a fully implemented automated testing system report up to a 67% reduction in defects in production and recover from failures 70% faster.

DevOps in practice highlights the need for thorough quality monitoring observability to achieve insight into application and infrastructure performance and ensures that teams can respond to issues, have an understanding of system behavior, and can rely on data-driven decisions.

Monitoring, at its best, includes real-time performance metrics and dashboards, centralized logging (with log analysis), distributed tracing for more complex applications, and alerting systems notifying teams about potential issues. Modern-day DevOps practices are placing increasing levels of emphasis on observability as it provides context and insights beyond simply monitoring, as observability answers questions about why systems behave in certain ways, not just what was observed.

Possibly the most challenging yet colorful (does cultivating need “Col” at the beginning?) of DevOps observability practices is developing a collaborative culture with shared responsibility for software quality and reliability, eliminating traditional barriers between development and operations teams.

Aspects of a collaborative DevOps culture include teams that are cross-functional with shared goals, blameless postmortems when issues occur, sharing knowledge and documentation, and celebrating success and learning from failure. Organizations that successfully transitioned their culture experience reports of 60% greater employee satisfaction and 50% lower turnover in technical roles.

As DevOps evolves, several contemporary practices have emerged to address ongoing challenges in software delivery and management.

Current DevOps practices include security as a fundamental aspect rather than a side note. Security capabilities are now integrated into software development processes and compliance evaluations as an ongoing component of risk management and resiliency.

In practice, security capabilities utilize automated security scanning in CI/CD pipelines, compliance as code to automate policy enforcement, runtime application security monitoring, and the provision of ongoing security training for development teams. Properly established DevSecOps practices yield a reduction of security vulnerabilities of 68% on average and a reduction in the cost of remediation by 72%.

Many organizations have discovered microservices architecture integrates seamlessly with DevOps practices and tools. The microservices approach decomposes applications into smaller services that can be deployed independently.

The advantages of microservices with DevOps practices are improvements in deployment flexibility and frequency and improved fault isolation and resiliency. Microservices also align better with teams and can provide better scalability of application components. Organizations using microservices claim 50% faster time-to-market for new features and improved system availability of 60%.

Container technologies such as Docker and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes have grown important to modern DevOps practices. Containers bundle applications with their dependencies to deliver consistency across a variety of environments.

Containerization offers environment consistency from development to production, better resource utilization and scaling, quicker application startup and deployments, and improved isolation between applications. Organizations that have implemented containerization report a 66% faster deployment cycle and a 75% reduction in issues related to environments.

GitOps is a new and growing evolution of DevOps practices that use Git repositories as a single source of truth for both infrastructure and applications that are declarative in nature. This allows teams to utilize all of the development tools they are familiar with to manage operational lifecycle.

Operations GitOps utilizes authoritative declarative descriptions of the entire system, version control of immutable infrastructure, automated synchronization between Git and the deployed system, and pull-based deployment methodology. Teams who move toward GitOps practices report an 80% reduction in configuration errors and a 45% improvement in recovery time objectives.

While the benefits of DevOps practices are substantial, many organizations will discover challenges when attempting to adopt these practices. Understanding the barriers is vital to the successful adoption of DevOps practices.

One of the most substantial barriers to DevOps adoption is cultural resistance to change. An organization with siloed departments and established traditional practices may find it difficult to embrace the collaborating mindset for collaborative change and success in DevOps.

To address this challenge, organizations will require an executive champion in the organization, preemptively communicating the value of DevOps practices, and taking a gradual approach to implementation that returns value sooner rather than later. Organizations that successfully enact a cultural shift typically start with small, cross-functional teams that are able to act as DevOps ambassadors throughout the organization.

Because the DevOps tools landscape is wide and always shifting, many organizations will accumulate a number of tools that simply do not integrate. This sprawl of tools becomes additional, new silos, overly complex, and undermines DevOps efforts.

Successful organizations deal with the layer of complexity of multiple, disparate tools through a coherent toolchain strategy with integration as its core principle, limiting selection to tools that create unique value for the team, and standardizing where feasible across teams. A coherent toolchain serves DevOps practices instead of making them overly complex.

Implementing the modern DevOps practices requires specialized skills that may not be found in a typical development or operations person. This skills gap can hinder quick adoption, and their value of DevOps behavior is inhibited.

Organizations can close this skills gap through a combination of targeted training, strategic hiring for critical skills, experienced consultants, and an internal learning path for existing team members. Investing in skills development will lead to long-term success and practices of DevOps.

Numerous companies face challenges while applying DevOps practices to legacy applications that were not designed with modern deployment practices in mind. These applications can suffer from inadequate test coverage, complex dependencies, and even reluctance to be migrated to containers, to name a few. Organizations looking to modernize these systems often benefit from comprehensive cloud migration solutions that address both technical and process challenges.

Effective and results-oriented approaches to this issue include incremental modernization of the sharing of legacy applications within the scope of CI/CD modern deployments where applicable and the use of different standards for legacy versus newly applied application code as it relates to the expectations of CI/CD workflows. Organizations that have successfully modernized legacy applications typically began modernization efforts on application attributes that are less critical and then progressively applied DevOps principles across the portfolio of applications.

A mid-sized financial services organization was experiencing challenges with their lengthy release cycles, frequent production issues for development efforts, and friction with development and operations teams. Their application of DevOps practices offers organizational-level learnings for organizations that might be experiencing similar challenges.

This organization began their application of CI/CD practices by developing a small cross-functional team that quickly focused on a mission-critical application used by external customers. The development team attempted to modernize the application as part of their project efforts by creating a CI/CD pipeline and automated testing frameworks and adopting IAC principles for the application. Within three months, deployment cycles were shortened from weeks to only hours, and production issues for deployment of the application were reduced by 45%.

Following the initial success, the organization then began to incrementally expand DevOps practices to additional applications, gaining traction through investments in training and tools and by adjusting their strategy to reflect previous learnings. They established priority for applications that had the highest implication on business impact and were technically appropriate for a DevOps shift.

Strong sponsorship from executives on establishing corporate sponsorship across departments, a commitment to measuring and communicating the improvements to gain momentum, investing in reusable automation that could be utilized across teams, and a commitment to continuous improvement of their DevOps practices.

Two years into the DevOps journey, the organization reported that time-to-market for new features had decreased 75%, production incidents were reduced by 60%, and employee satisfaction amongst technical teams had increased significantly.

At AppRecode, we help organizations implement effective DevOps processes that meet their specific needs and challenges. Our approach combines technical expertise with proven change management processes to maximize adoption and demonstrable results.

Our DevOps consulting service can include an initial analysis of your current development and operations processes to identify potential improvement opportunities and challenges. Thereafter an approach will be devised specifically for you that prioritizes high-impact intervention while considering something to achieve real business goals.

Our implementation services consist of setting up CI/CD pipelining, implementing infrastructure as code, developing automated tests, and setting up effective monitoring and observability solutions. We focus on cloud DevOps best practices to help organizations fully utilize cloud platforms towards efficiency and scale.

In addition to technical implementation, we provide training and mentoring so your teams can learn the skills that support DevOps. Our change management disciplines help navigate cultural challenges, drive buy-in at all levels of the organization, and establish the collaborative mindset necessary for successful DevOps transformation.

DevOps practices have moved beyond a niche approach to an essential connection in organizations that want to deliver software well in today’s competitive environment. With DevOps methods, organizations can adopt customer spectrum best practices such as CI/CD, infrastructure as code configurations, automated tests, and monitoring processes that lead to faster delivery, higher quality, and better collaboration.

Modern DevOps methods are for EPCOT and are increasingly active and subject to proliferation or coincidence of the day or week. Modern DevOps methods are incorporating security through DevSecOps methods, microservices-based architectures, containerization, and GitOps definitions. These methods can help organizations tackle new issues through continuous learning and iteration around common practices in DevOps.

While challenges surround the implementation of DevOps practices organizations that have faced those challenges have seen significant improvements to the speed of delivery, quality of software, and happiness of the team. Developers will have the ability to leverage other organizations’ learning regarding common pitfalls in DevOps and implement practices they know are effective on their own DevOps journey.

As technology advances, established DevOps can be essential to organizations wanting to keep up and innovate, and socially, if organizations adopt DevOps practices today, they can rely on their already adopted processes and practices tomorrow in order to be continually engaged in an intensity of sustained competitive advantage in a rapidly advancing digital world.

Key DevOps practices that are put into place include continuous integration and continuous delivery, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing in the development pipeline, monitoring the development, observability, and encouraging a cooperative culture with tourism developers and operations teams taking shared ownership of DevOps practices.

Automation allows all of this to happen in a way that is far more efficient due to reduced manual work, removal of error-prone processes, consistent environments, improved feedback loops, and enabling teams to focus their technical efforts on worthwhile work versus effort on repetitive work. Effective and robust automation is critical for enabling DevOps practices to scale in larger organizations.

The primary DevOps tools you need include version control tools with Git, CI/CD systems with Jenkins or GitHub Actions, IaC systems with Terraform or AWS CloudFormation, containerization tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, and monitoring tools with Prometheus and Grafana. Each of these enables a series of DevOps functions and the best effectiveness degree for your and your organization’s needs and technology stack.

DevOps enables performance innovation in the cloud through the automation of infrastructure that allows the usage of resources to be most optimized, the performance of auto-scaling, which automatically increases and decreases based on usage, permanent monitoring to inform you of performance issues, the ability to deploy changes quickly to improve functionality, and the use of conventional configurations across cloud environments.

The primary obstacles are organizational resistance to cultural change, a greater number of tools to complicate your process, skill gaps with existing teams, integrating legacy systems into a modern DevOps workflow, and, of course, security as your product elements flow through delivery pipelines. To achieve success, you should plan to behave both technically and/or organizationally to enable DevOps adoption.