DevOps Best Practices
Evolution is the key to survival. This is not only true for living organisms but also for companies. DevOps is a set of tools and practices that help speed up the development and operationalization of software products. This allows companies to better serve their customers by providing them with high-quality products.
Essentially, this helps beat the competition. But beating your competitors isn’t the goal. The goal is to be better every time you intend to launch a new product. That’s where DevOps best practices come in. These practices focus on improving a set of factors which include:
- Speed
- Reliability
- Security
- Collaboration between the development and the operations team
- Continuous and rapid delivery
The factors are core features of Iron.io solutions for development teams such as IronWorker and IronMQ. Start your free 14 day Iron.io trial today!
DevOps best practices require continuous change. This means that your company will need to evolve and adopt an integrated change management strategy.
Here are some of the best DevOps practices:
1. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (ci cd) involve the working together of both the development teams and the operations team. The developers in the development team should build codes and continuously merge them into a repository that they share with the operations team.
This allows the operations team to continuously test the code as it is being built. This makes it easy to identify any weaknesses in the code such as security defects. The collaboration between the two teams allows the process to have immediate feedback. Thus, making working together much easier. It also speeds up how fast the product will reach the market.
Continuous delivery builds upon continuous integration. This is because it creates production environments where automated builds are continuously tested and prepared for release. Proper implementation of the continuous delivery process ensures that a software release from your company has undergone a vigorous standardized process.
2. Automation
Automate every process in the product development and testing stage. Creating an automated system requires the use of technological tools. Some of the areas that will benefit from automation are code development, data, and network changes. The process of automation should also include creating test scenarios for new software development.
Creating automated test cases will help you know about various outcomes. This will help you find out which areas you can improve to have better software. Automate processes will help speed up the development cycle. This will give you a competitive edge over other players in the market. Effective automated testing requires the use of appropriate automation tools at each stage of the development process.
3. Use of Integrated Change Management
Technology is continuously changing and advancing with new innovative tools that make the current ones obsolete. Adopting continuous change management and integrating into both teams is key to meeting new customer demands especially under dynamic circumstances. Change management will help provide additional support by updating various processes of the development cycle.
Your company should adopt a flexible model that is open to change. This will make it easy to use integrated change management. You should also anticipate any significant technology changes and prepare all levels of your organization for adopting new practices.
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4. Using Infrastructure as Code
Managing your infrastructure as code means using various software development techniques and continuous integration. This allows developers to use programs to interact with the company’s infrastructure. This process is also heavily reliant on automation. This is because developers can only use infrastructure as code when it comes to code-based tools.
Using infrastructure as code makes it easy to update the technology to the latest versions. It also improves the speed at which new products can get deployed to the market.
5. Monitor Existing Applications
Deploying the product shouldn’t be the last step. Proactively monitor the running applications. This will help you find new ways to optimize the existing product. Additionally, it will help you know what improvements will help similar products that haven’t reached the deployment stage. The monitoring process should be automatic and apps’ operating system can send various performance metrics back to the developers. Monitoring running applications will also provide you with data analytics on how to provide customer support.
6. Automated Dashboard
An automated dashboard gives the operations team with new insights that help them in the testing of new products. Developers’ operations can also leverage their intelligence with the automated dashboard. The dashboard also helps both teams get more in-depth information. This aids in developing new ways to make the product perform better.
The dashboard also makes it easier to review any configuration changes across the entire system. It also makes DevOps tooling more effective by giving the operations real-time data. Thus, you can analyze this data and select the best automation tools for various products.
7. Facilitate Active Participation of All Stakeholders
Working together is one of the key ways of delivering great products. Including the views of different stakeholders is key, even if they don’t participate in the product development cycle. DevOps team should consider the views and integrate some of their concerns or interests when possible. This may yield better results and involving stakeholders is key to building a great working environment.
8. Make the Automated Process Secure
A highly automated process needs very tight security. This is because cyber-attacks could result in massive losses of both crucial data and money. Use secure internal networks and grant access to only a handful of trustworthy individuals. Make security an important priority across the entire development cycle. Securing your processes will help you better manage product development.
9. Build Microservices Architecture
This is where you create one application by building several small services. The architecture should ensure that each small service is independent. This means that it can run alone and can communicate with other services. Each service should perform a specific purpose and should also work well with the different services.
10. Continuous Deployment
Make the deployment process continuous by releasing the product code in versions. This helps make the deployment process more efficient. It also makes testing the code much easier and allows the product to entire the final stage much more quickly. This helps minimize the risks of failure.
Thrive with DevOps
The collaboration between different teams in an organization is key to the overall success of the company. Implementing DevOps best practices ensures that both development and operation teams are on the same page in the product development process. This speeds up product development, minimizes risks, improves efficiency, and helps the company gain a competitive advantage over other players in the same industry. Start your free 14 day Iron.io trial and test out DevOps solutions such as IronWorker and IronMQ.
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