DevOps is more than tools. It's culture, process, and the glue that keeps your team and infrastructure moving smoothly. Here are 10 field-tested best practices that helped us build better, faster, and safer!
1. ✅ Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a Must
If you're still manually provisioning servers—stop. Tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation make infra reproducible, version-controlled, and auditable.
🛠️ Example: We versioned our entire AWS VPC and EC2 setup using Terraform, making rollbacks painless.
2. 🧪 Automate Your Tests Before You Automate Deployment
CI/CD is only useful if your code is safe to ship. Make sure to have:
Unit tests
Integration tests
Smoke tests
We use GitHub Actions + Jest + Postman collections to test everything before merge.
3. 📦 Dockerize Everything
Containers make your apps portable, predictable, and production-ready.
Use multi-stage builds to keep images lean.
`
FROM node:18 as builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN npm install && npm run build
FROM node:18-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /app/build ./build
CMD ["node", "build/index.js"]
`
4. ⏱️ Monitor Everything, Alert Only When Needed
Use Prometheus + Grafana for visual dashboards, but be careful not to trigger alert fatigue.
💡 Best Tip: Use thresholds based on SLOs, not arbitrary numbers.
5. 🔒 Secrets Management: Don’t Be That Guy
Never commit .env or AWS keys in Git. Use:
AWS Secrets Manager
HashiCorp Vault
Doppler or SOPS for GitOps
6. 🔄 Immutable Deployments > Manual Patching
Always deploy new versions of your app instead of updating in place.
We use blue-green deployment in Kubernetes to avoid downtime.
7. 📅 Postmortems Without Blame
Every incident is a chance to learn. Write blameless postmortems that focus on:
What happened
Why it happened
What we’ll do next
Use tools like Incident.io or Confluence templates to standardize this.
8. 📦 Use Artifacts and Repos Wisely
Push your builds to:
GitHub Releases
AWS CodeArtifact
JFrog Artifactory
Tag every build with a unique version to trace issues faster.
9. 🌐 GitOps for the Win
Declarative infra + Git + Automation = GitOps.
We use ArgoCD to auto-sync Kubernetes manifests from Git.
🔥 Tip: Every change to production infra goes via a pull request.
10. 🙌 Dev + Ops = DevOps
Sounds obvious, but cross-functional collaboration is what powers it all. Weekly syncs between developers and DevOps helped us uncover bottlenecks and build empathy.
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