DevOps adoption (or success) is not an overnight process, but it is certainly necessary in today’s world dominated by VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). DevOps is a cultural adoption to shorten the development cycle and provide continuous development of high-quality software. The ever-increasing adoption of DevOps by many organizations across the globe clearly indicates its potential as a key enabler.
According to Atlassian’s DevOps Trends Survey
- 99% say DevOps has had a positive impact on their organization in 2020
- 49% of companies report a reduction in time-to-market software and services in 2020
According to Puppet’s 2023 State of DevOps
- Many people have observed significant positive effects, as the majority of participants (68%) have already noticed a boost in their development speed. Additionally, 42% of respondents state that the improvement in speed has been substantial.
- A large portion of the participants are encountering a diverse range of advantages, spanning from faster delivery (40%) to increased productivity and efficiency (59%), as well as improved workflow standards (57%).
Another study on DevOps by DORA’s State of DevOps 2019 found that DevOps practitioners deliver results 128 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams. In 2023, 84% of organizations have adopted cloud-based DevOps practices, leveraging the scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency offered by cloud platforms. Also, according to a report by Statista, DevOps is the top software development methodology worldwide.
What is DevOps and Why is it so important?
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, processes, and organizational culture that combine software development and IT operations. By fostering collaboration between these teams, it helps businesses in getting faster and better software to market as compared to other traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.
It is expected that the DevOps market size will reach $57.90 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 24.2% from 2021 to 2030. DevOps aims to reduce cycle time from coding a piece of software to deploying it so companies can improve on three fronts: Speed, Cost, and Quality.
DevOps has changed the face of the industry. This practice brings forth a new culture that is free from silos and consistently produces high-quality software by fostering greater communication and smoother collaboration between teams.
The next section discusses the best practices in DevOps to help you take your project to a new level. These DevOps best practices can expedite your application development cycle and boost your business efficiency.
DevOps Best Practices to Follow
1. Agile Project Management
Agile is an iterative approach to software development that puts emphasis on delivering work in smaller increments rather than waiting for the whole product to get launched to test its viability. In the agile framework, requirements, plans and results get evaluated continuously and it provides time for teams to work on the feedback.
2. Build a Collaborative Culture
The primary goal of DevOps is a collaboration between developers and operations teams. That means they need to work together constantly and be open to working closely together. The process can be challenging at times, especially when developers are used to working independently on their code and operations teams do everything by themselves. But if you want your team to succeed, both sides of the equation need to learn how to collaborate. For better collaboration and to avoid barriers that come in its way, you can adopt the “You build it, you run it” practice.
3. Put Customer Satisfaction First
Businesses can’t deliver value without understanding what their users want — and that means putting their needs ahead of any internal process or procedure that might get in the way of making them happy. An essential part of this principle is delivering incremental improvements to your application based on user feedback rather than waiting until you’re ready to ship an entirely new version of the product before making improvements based on customer feedback. To make this possible, there is a need for the involvement of all the key stakeholders, without it, DevOps won’t be successful.
Collaboration can be one of the biggest aspects of the success of DevOps. To foster smoother collaboration, it is recommended that you use automation to streamline workflows or for repetitive tasks like environment setups or reporting. You can also leverage the power of automation to bring agility, reduce errors, and achieve faster time to market as it saves time and effort for developers, testers and operational personnel and in turn the overall cost.
4. Adopt Automation in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous Integration (CI) is a DevOps best practice that involves integrating code changes from different developers’ branches into one mainline branch at least once daily. CD refers to automating the process with tools like Jenkins or TeamCity. It automatically tests new code as soon as it’s committed and then deploys it if everything looks good — without human intervention.
5. Use the Right Tools
It’s tempting to go all-in on one tool or another. But if you try to use everything at once, you’ll likely spend more time configuring than actually using your tools. Also, be sure to use tools that are compatible with each other. If you have a choice between two tools that do basically the same thing but work with different systems, pick the one that works with both systems.
As a result, developers can easily switch from one language to another without having to learn new toolsets or change their coding style too much — which will help productivity down the line when they need to transition from development into production environments.
Some of the great tools that will help you keep everything in sync:
- Source control systems like Git or Mercurial make sure that every change is tracked and visible to everyone on the team.
- Version control systems like Jenkins CI allow you to build software using automated processes.
- Continuous integration tools like Jenkins CI will run tests.
6. Monitor the Right Metrics
The important step for any DevOps project is to monitor the right metrics. That means measuring and understanding how well your system performs, not just how fast it changes. You need to know what happens when there’s a problem and when things run smoothly. This will help you determine where your bottlenecks are and what changes you need to make to improve your processes. It helps to measure how long it takes to recover from a partial or total failure and how often new code is deployed into production.
7. Don’t Forget About DevSecOps
DevSecOps means considering security for software and infrastructure from the beginning of the development process. This includes designing security measures and incorporating them into the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Security is everyone’s responsibility and should be considered a vital part of the entire application lifecycle, not just an optional feature.
In recent years, there has been a greater emphasis on securing the software supply chain due to an increase in malicious attacks. In the world of infrastructure, even small errors can cause significant disruptions.
8. Switch to Microservices
Microservices allow developers to build small, independent applications instead of large monolithic applications. This allows developers to create individual services that each perform a specific task. For example, one service might be used to display user profile information while another carries out user authentication.
Each service is independent and can be scaled up or down as needed by the developer. This gives them more control over the performance of their applications and makes it easier for them to respond quickly to customer demand changes.
Microservices also make it easier for developers to test their code because they can run tests against only one service at a time instead of having to test all parts at once.
Conclusion
There you have it – DevOps best practices, how they could help your business, and why you should think about adopting this approach in the first place. With around 75% of DevOps initiatives failing if not managed by experts it seems daunting to implement at first, but the advantages far outweigh any perceived pain that it might engender.
So, get thinking about how DevOps could revolutionize your business for the better with the expertise and experience of Pragmatyc
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