Top DevOps Best Practices for 2024
10 min read
10 Aug 2024
Noah
DevOps
Accelerating software development flow from development to production can be an urgent challenge. To make it worse, many project managers find it difficult to change operations. DevOps practices within the software development cycle are designed to precisely save this situation.
And it have been successful in this mission. This is not an impression but a fact.
According to Redgate Software’s 2021 State of Database DevOps report, 74% of respondents said they are using a DevOps approach to development. Additionally, nearly half said they use three or more databases, compared to 30% who use just one database platform.
The report further notes that IT teams have remained remarkably productive despite working remotely. 80% of respondents said working from home will remain in place for the long term, and 63% said it has increased their productivity.
Therefore, since its emergence ten years ago, DevOps practices have spread across organizations, and the word “DevOps” has become a buzzword in the technology world.
But don't be fooled by trend and fame: DevOps is not simple or trivial. Implementing the best practices of a DevOps cycle requires careful evolution so as not to disrupt the functioning of activities. But since you must start somewhere, this article is the right place.
In this post, we will present the best practices that you can start now in your organization based on the basic concept of DevOps and the DevOps cycle.
DevOps is a working model that unites the development and operations teams, and sometimes security teams (DevSecOps), throughout a product's life cycle to gain agility and increase communication and collaboration in processes considered not very agile.
Therefore, it is not a position, methodology, software, or way to quickly adjust an organization's problems but a way of working to improve and integrate practices, processes, and systems.
AWS defines DevOps as follows:
"DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that enhance an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: optimizing and improving products faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes."
Here, we like Microsoft's definition, which is simple and, therefore, touches on the essentials:
"DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to automate software delivery and continuously enable the delivery of value to users."
Given this nature, adopting DevOps practices requires a cultural change and affects the entire organization.
DevOps culture encompasses a set of principles that enable software development and operations teams to work together efficiently to deliver quality products faster.
We have listed fundamental principles for establishing and maintaining high performance so that your company can successfully adopt or migrate to DevOps practices.
All IT product and service development activities must be guided by customer satisfaction. To achieve this, it is essential to have feedback loops with the end user, allowing development and operations teams to fine-tune their work.
Moving away from waterfall and process-oriented models is an effective way to shift the mindset of your team so that everyone involved is thinking about the big picture and not just their specific roles. When everyone works toward a common goal, achieving the desired outcome is easier.
IT products or services created and delivered by DevOps teams remain under the responsibility of these groups from concept to completion. This dramatically increases accountability for the deliverables and quality of planned products/services.
DevOps teams are typically vertical and utterly independent during the software development and operations process. This requires a balanced skill set and also the need for team members with more generalist profiles.
In a DevOps culture, the focus is on continuous process improvement to minimize waste, optimize delivery speed and costs, and thus continually improve the products/services offered. Experimentation is, therefore, an essential activity in developing a way to learn from failures.
Automating the software development process and the entire infrastructure scenario is synonymous with a drive to renew the way the DevOps team delivers its services.
DevOps brings together tools, practices, and principles that integrate teams to shorten the development cycle. This way, problems are more easily identified, the time to fix them is shorter, and, due to constant change, the end result is better.
The DevOps life cycle comprises different stages. They are:
DevOps practices help teams develop products efficiently, cooperatively, and consistently.
Here are the top DevOps practices that can help boost your project productivity and reduce time-to-market:
Create your value stream map so that the entire team can visualize where it delivers value to the customer and where it does not. Use it as guidance for the continuous improvement process in your operations.
Instead of keeping the work of changing codes in isolation for each developer, which can generate incompatibility and adverse effects on the system, in CI, everything is gathered in a trunk with a version control system, where automated tests are also run to validate and detect bugs. If an error occurs, it is immediately and easily corrected, ensuring the quality, functionality, and stability of the system, as well as trunk compatibility.
Continous distribution automatically prepares code changes for production, allowing new functionality to be released to systems while they are being developed rather than just on a specific release date.
Micro services is the architecture that moves away from the coupled monolithic model towards simple and independent services—with their own process and unique function but linked by APIs—making applications more flexible, reducing the overhead of updating them, and allowing for faster operation.
This involves collecting information about application performance and usage patterns. This information will be used to make improvements, going back to the beginning of the cycle. Thanks to continuous monitoring, DevOps professionals can observe and detect compliance issues and security threats. Monitoring also helps teams study relevant metrics and resolve issues in real-time when they arise.
DevOps practices emerged and thrived in software development. They were implemented to challenge traditional work models such as waterfall, in which there is little or no connection between teams. Companies such as Amazon, Adobe, Netflix, Target, and Walmart were early adopters.
If you are not from the technology field, do not have cloud infrastructure, and think DevOps practices are not for your company, check this out.
Although DevOps was born with the move to the cloud, that is, with the move to an elastic and containerized infrastructure in which automation is more accessible, this does not mean that it cannot benefit on-premise ecosystems, especially when the idea is to migrate it to the cloud.
Your organization indeed uses some software in its business processes. And your business is certainly different from what it was ten years ago. Change is a constant!
If your systems have yet to move beyond version one, your organization is risking its future.
DevOps, like agile, is a way to help teams work together toward their goals. This involves collaboration, communication, and continuous operational improvements. These requirements are necessary for all organizations to grow.
As we said, you don't hire or buy a DevOps system. It's a cultural and procedural adjustment that affects the entire organization, and although there is a lot of literature on it, there are no how-to manuals.
For this reason, implementing it effectively is so complex that it is a particular process for each organization, dependent on its IT infrastructure and corporate structure.
The good news is that some of this way of working principles can be implemented now. Let’s look at some of them.
If you plan to implement DevOps practices, get ready. You will need to make a significant effort to make everyone understand that the practice creates value for the entire organization, generating a fundamental change in culture and mindset.
In an organization, especially a large one, it is straightforward to put processes and tools above all else and become locked into this mindset, not because it makes sense but because it is how things have always been done.
Regardless of who is responsible, assessing whether employees, stakeholders, and, most importantly, customers benefit from your current mindset is essential.
Within DevOps practices and agile, there is no process so perfect and well done that it cannot be improved. Sell this idea to the teams. This principle creates an openness to change and experimentation.
According to Microsoft, one requirement for implementing DevOps practices is to spend some time studying how your processes work right now. From there, you will evaluate what is working well and what is not and then prioritize what to adjust first.
Look: to improve something, you need to know it with complete transparency. Identify what’s working—where the team creates value—and what can be improved—because it doesn’t create value—across all aspects, from operations to tools to results. Google has this quick test.
This work is the construction of a Value Stream Map (VSM), a very detailed visual presentation of your processes and the time they take to happen from end to end.
By clearly observing where the process generates value and where it does not, you will know where to act. Obviously, VSM does not tell you what to do, but it provides objective guidance.
Using your VSM, you can outline specific, measurable goals and results with a deadline.
Attention: Be small. Don't try to do everything at once. Small changes are faster to implement than big ones, which are harder to validate and maintain.
Here, you will work in light of the DevOps practice cycle we saw above. Ask yourself which activities that do not generate value can be automated or included in other phases that do generate value.
Several tools can help your team collaborate, build, test, and deploy with CI/CD. Equip your team with tools that can streamline their routine and that they are comfortable with. Let your team participate in choosing them.
This practice is common in companies like Google and Netflix, which see empowerment as co-responsibility for systems and costs.
To do this, they select cross-cutting areas and representatives from different teams, who establish a broad set of tools to meet the organization's needs.
They also recommend periodic tool reviews, which allow discussion of new technologies. Finally, processes should be used to document the use of tools outside of the set already used.
Creating a DevOps culture means changing organizational paradigms by integrating development and operations teams to deliver quality and agility in products and services.
In this sense, aligning with the DevOps culture requires efficient internal processes that generate customer satisfaction. Thus, DevOps is an approach created to ensure that high-quality software reaches end users excellently.
Applying best development practices is an evolution in the way organizations operate. This means applying best practices for developing, testing, and delivering products and services.
In addition to the better-developed product/service, trust, collaboration, collective responsibility, and professional learning are among the main results of the company's DevOps culture.
Many organizations stop in time; they lose their ability to innovate when they reach certain levels and sizes. According to Microsoft:
Research shows that the most successful DevOps users continually monitor and test, regularly adjust processes to their needs, and integrate security into their systems.
Well, this is nothing more than continuous innovation. In an article about innovation management, we have already mentioned that this is not easy, especially when faced with day-to-day management, which takes up a large part of our immediate concerns.
Process automation with DevOps practices has brought countless benefits to software operations and development, reducing the risk of errors.
In addition, supporters of this approach perceived other advantages, which have been gaining increasing strength in organizations that wish to remain competitive in the market.
Among the main ones, we can mention:
But how do you measure the success of DevOps?
To measure the ROI of DevOps practices, it is recommended that you base yourself on the three main components of this philosophy: people, processes, and technology.
See how it works in practice:
Focus on productivity and quality of work. Find out how long it takes the professional to complete each task and how they deliver it.
Measure speed, relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency at work. Customer feedback surveys can help you link numerical values to product quality, performance, and experience.
Technology metrics measure hardware, software, and service functions. Software failure rate connects directly to development and deployment metrics.
Adopting DevOps practices is no longer a question of “if” but “when.”
This is a good thing because it will help your team implement improvements more frequently, faster, and with fewer failures. This will help your team quickly adapt to new scenarios, experiment more, and be more resilient in solving problems.
But remember: adopting all DevOps practices is a gradual process, and reaching maturity takes time and a lot of practice.
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