6 DevOps Best Practices for Success

Nowadays, businesses, particularly SMEs without an IT department, want to be technically knowledgeable and want to benefit from technological advancement right away. According to a Google survey, 86% of enterprises believe their company must create and begin production of new software as soon as possible. Implementing DevOps has grown in popularity over the last few years. 77% of enterprises currently rely on DevOps best practices to release software or plan to do so shortly. Therefore, DevOps comes in handy. The specific technology has the potential to be a game-changer in business.

Implementing DevOps has grown in popularity over the last few years

Companies that use or outsource DevOps processes have demonstrated that its principles can result in improved project visibility, increased development efficiency, simplified system configuration, optimized resources, and strengthened data security.

So, what exactly is DevOps? What are the stages of the DevOps lifecycle? How will it assist your company? And what are the important practices for putting DevOps in place?

Read about it in our article.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is defined as a software development process and even a cultural transformation within a business. DevOps aims to accelerate the delivery of high-quality software solutions by automating and merging the work of development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), which are normally performed independently. However, the most successful DevOps procedures and cultures can transcend development and operations in practice. This enables the efficient software development lifecycle to incorporate inputs from various application stakeholders, such as infrastructure and quality engineering, security, risk management, or users and consumers. Additionally, DevOps reflects the current level of evolution of software delivery cycles over the last two decades.

Instead of large app-wide code releases every few months or even years, we now have regular releases (every day or sometimes multiple times daily) of minor incremental features and functionality upgrades. Thus, DevOps is about meeting the requirements of software users for regular, creative innovations and ensuring continuous performance and availability. DevOps, as a philosophy, is linked to continuous improvement, collaboration, and operational transparency. DevOps is not concerned with individual tasks; rather, it is concerned with the full flow—from basic concepts to finished products or functions.

This strategy assists in optimizing all intermediate processes, with an emphasis on delivering adequate business value at a faster rate. This enables efficient DevOps teams to accelerate time to market, remove problems, and maintain a solid infrastructure.

The DevOps lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle is a collection of iterative and automated development procedures (sometimes referred to as workflows). Simultaneously, these activities are part of a bigger development lifecycle, often known as an automated and iterative one. This encourages optimizing the speed with which required software solutions are delivered. While there may be some variation in the names and numbers assigned to workflows, experts have typically identified the following six:

Planning.

At this stage, DevOps teams evaluate new features and functions for the next release based on user feedback, case studies, and internal stakeholder input. The planning phase aims to maximize the product's business value by generating a feature backlog. When delivered, these characteristics will provide the desired output with value.

Development.

User stories and associated backlog items require testing, coding, and implementing new and improved functionality. Test-driven development, pair programming, and peer code reviews are prominent approaches in this stage. Also, developers prefer writing and testing code locally before sending it through a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline.

Integration.

They verify the code and bundle it into an executable for further distribution. As well as merge code changes into a “master” copy, analyze source code repositories, and compile automation. Finally, before moving on to the next phase, store the continuous integration (CI) outputs in a binary repository.

Deployment.

The integration phase's results are deployed to the runtime environment, allowing for runtime testing of quality, compliance, and security. If developers find mistakes or faults, they can fix them before end-users notice. Providing the initial production deployment to a small selection of end-users is effective. Once stable, the deployment will be made available to all users.

Operations.

The operations stage ensures that all given features work well and without hiccups. DevOps teams employ operations to ensure network, storage, platform, compute, and security performance. Finally, if something goes wrong, the operations phase helps identify the issues, warn the appropriate individuals, and resolve them.

Learning.

End-users and clients must provide input on the software's features, functions, performance, and business value. This data can be used to improve the next release of the planning stage. This involves evaluating prior operations backlog items to help developers avoid past mishaps and prevent future ones.

The advantages of DevOps Outsourcing

DevOps outsourcing offers various advantages

The key reason for the surge in DevOps implementation is that this strategy has a big impact on how businesses operate at the most fundamental levels. In this section, we will go over some of the most important advantages of using DevOps in businesses:

1. Swiftness.

Using DevOps allows for high velocity, which includes innovating for customers faster, responding to changing markets, and becoming more effective at generating business results. As a result, this paradigm encourages DevOps teams to achieve their goals. Microservices and CD, for example, empower these teams to take responsibility for software services and provide necessary modifications to them much more quickly.

2. Prompt delivery.

The DevOps strategy encourages increasing the frequency and tempo of releases. This enables faster product innovation and improvement. After all, the sooner a company repairs defects and launches new functionality, the faster it responds to client needs and gains a competitive advantage. The use of CI with CD anticipates the automation of the release process, from constructing to deploying.

3. Dependability.

DevOps ensures the high quality of app updates or infrastructure modifications, allowing a company to provide reliable delivery at a faster pace while maintaining a favorable end-user experience. Using approaches such as CI and CD allows developers to ensure that all changes are functional and safe. Meanwhile, monitoring and logging enable the collection of real-time data on overall performance.

4. Scalability.

Implementing DevOps allows scalable operation and control of a company's infrastructure and associated development processes. Automation means that a business may handle complicated systems more effectively while also lowering risks. For example, the infrastructure as code approach provides for more efficient management of diverse contexts such as development, testing, and production.

5. Improving effectiveness and adaptability

The DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes principles such as ownership and accountability, assists in making teams more productive. This encourages strong collaboration between developers and operations teams as they begin to share numerous roles and combine their procedures. Continuous testing significantly improves the product's quality. Outsourcing DevOps provides a great deal of freedom. Reducing development timelines without the burden of supplying tools and resources considerably improves quality. Furthermore, using DevOps reduces inefficiency and saves time by lowering handover intervals between development and operations. Additionally, you are always free to seek out the best fit for your business.

6. Cost-effectiveness

Eventually, it always boils down to money. Hiring an in-house DevOps team and investing in personnel and tools proves to be rather costly. If you own a small software development company, this expense can easily exceed your budget. That is when DevOps outsourcing enters the picture. The majority of DevOps outsourcing businesses provide economical plans and solutions.

7. Security

Outsourcing firms have a robust security framework in place

DevOps outsourcing firms have a robust security framework in place. The majority of outsourcing firms use the Dev-Sec-Ops paradigm to merge security and development. As a consequence, the severity of external security threats diminishes.

DevOps best practices

Apart from developing a DevOps cultural paradigm, a company can bring DevOps to life inside its teams by incorporating certain practices within the software development lifecycle. While some of these methods concentrate on speeding, automating, and optimizing a single-stage, others span multiple phases. This enables DevOps teams to develop and manage fault-tolerant processes, resulting in enhanced productivity. In the following sections, we examine some of the best practices that businesses might use for DevOps:

CI and CD are two terms that refer to the same thing.

When these two approaches are combined, CI/CD is created, a procedure that needs to be fully automated at each step from code commit to production deployment. By implementing CI/CD, teams can focus on developing code and avoid overhead and potential human errors associated with manual procedures.

Additionally, CI/CD enables the rapid deployment of new code with fewer risks. This encourages frequent deployments and improves team agility, efficiency, and even confidence in the running code.

Version management.

Businesses use version control to manage code in versions – to keep track of revisions or changes – to make it easier to examine and recover code. This method is always carried out utilizing specialized version control systems that enable multiple developers to collaborate on code creation.

Version control is a fundamental DevOps strategy that enables developers to share coding duties and store work for fast recovery. Finally, this strategy is critical to others, such as CI and infrastructure as code.

Infrastructure as code.

Organizations can use this strategy to deploy system resources in a reliable, repeatable, and regulated manner. Deploying infrastructure as code automates deployment and mitigates the risk of human error, which is especially important in complex situations. This type of solution enables DevOps teams to maintain development and testing environments that are identical to those used in production. Thus, replicating environments across several data centers or cloud platforms has become significantly easier and more efficient.

Management of configurations.

This approach entails maintaining the state of a system's resources, such as servers, virtual machines, or databases. By utilizing configuration management technologies, DevOps teams may make controlled and systematic changes, minimizing the risks associated with system configuration modification. These tools are used by organizations to keep track of a system's status and to avoid configuration drift.
Additionally, businesses can integrate them with infrastructure as code to simplify the definition and configuration of systems.

Monitoring and logging

DevOps teams monitor metrics and logs to determine the impact of application and infrastructure performance on the end-user experience while interacting with their products. Businesses collect, categorize, and analyze data and logs from apps and infrastructure to understand how changes or upgrades influence users and to gain insight into the fundamental causes of difficulties and unexpected changes. Active monitoring is crucial because services must be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week as the frequency of changes grows.

Collaboration and communication.

By physically merging the workflows and responsibilities of developers and operations, implementing DevOps technologies, and automating software delivery processes fosters collaboration. DevOps teams build strong cultural norms around data sharing and ease collaboration through the use of chat apps, project tracking tools, and wikis. This results in improved communication between development and operational teams, as well as marketing and sales.

Finally, this method enables a greater concentration on the company's projects.

Why Groove Technology?

We have extensive experience providing DevOps outsourcing services, including cloud adoption (architecture, migration, and optimization), developing and streamlining continuous integration and continuous delivery processes, detecting and preventing security issues, and providing firewall-as-a-service.

At Groove, our DevOps teams and professionals support a variety of technologies, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure,…

We collaborate with a diverse range of SMEs worldwide to assist them in taking their operations to the next level.

Groove Technology can provide full-service DevOps outsourcing, or we can deploy some of our professionals to collaborate with your in-house developers. In terms of project management, we are capable of implementing both fixed-scope and time-and-materials techniques. Contact our experts if you have any additional queries about our DevOps outsourcing services.

Summary

Outsourcing DevOps services enables you to tap into a reservoir of technical talent that extends well beyond your local market, while also achieving faster delivery and improved results. However, the success of DevOps outsourcing is contingent upon the expertise, experience, and knowledge of the DevOps outsourcing firm with which you engage. As a result, if you're looking for a reputable vendor to outsource DevOps, keep those guidelines in mind. They will assist you in ensuring a seamless and risk-free DevOps outsourcing experience.