Are you willing to look around to spot new and exciting ways to stay attractive to potential and current customers? Well, whatever business you have incepted, one of the most important aspects to take into account is staying swift and timely and yet relevant. No matter how many new apps you try, you bog down in the development phase, but there is no point since you don’t fix bugs quickly. You see, today’s customers can seamlessly slip through the cracks right in front of your eyes. I am sure this is the last thing you want to happen. Time to speed up and up your game by adopting the ever-evolving DevOps model. And time to look around for outsourcing DevOps automation and best practices.
DevOps is no longer a buzzword; it has become quite a household term in the tech realm. All kinds of businesses are going crazy over adopting DevOps, and why not, since the concept has thoroughly eliminated the cold war between development and operational teams in a whiff. Now the cut-throat competition is becoming more and more fierce; not keeping up means you have a lot to lose, and in this hurry, businesses often end up adopting every latest tool and technology. Unfortunately, all this combustion can result in huge disasters. And techs such as DevOps, cloud computing, AI, and ML are no longer an exception here.
The key to success lies within the choice of your technology and, more importantly, how you are going to make the most of it. Since everyone knows for a fact that DevOps is no longer a passing fad, it seems to have become the topic du jour in the world of the software landscape, and getting caught in this storm is pretty easy, but at times, it has the potential to drive you insane. Which is why it is often said, when used in the right manner, any technology chosen can turn out to be the most helpful tool.
It is rightly said, any development project involves an equivalent amount of benefits and risks. Sometimes, making assumptions can give an invitation to a host of insane problems. Well, at least with the help of the following post, I am going to check out one of your such concerns right away! As the title suggests, the following post focuses on what DevOps is, how significant the concept is in today’s ever-changing times, and above all, what the top best practices are to successfully implement DevOps.
So brace yourself and read away!
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a process designed to successfully speed up frequent changes made to the application, as well as seamlessly combine the software development process (Dev) and software operations (Ops). DevOps includes automation, which definitely gives a sudden boost in terms of efficiency and productivity in the app development process. Here, deployment is supposed to happen pretty much faster. Certain aspects included in DevOps include:
- Easy collaboration
- Tooling and automation
- Gradual changes
- CI/CD
- Measure everything
Usually, any DevOps program is based on three pillars:
- Absolute deployment of the right technologies and tools.
- Precise documentation and implementation of nothing less than best practices.
- Fostering a DevOps culture thoroughly.
All these criteria need to be fulfilled on a more tangible level. In addition, DevOps teams are highly responsible for successfully maintaining overall development infrastructure, offering a precise range of tools and services for developers, testing, ensuring easy distribution with the help of CI and CD delivery mechanisms, and above all, creating environments that are easy to work within.
Top key principles of DevOps
- High Speed
- Great Efficiency
- Absolute quality
- High-end security
In addition to all this, DevOps promotes collaboration and communication, which is extremely important in today’s times, and people are highly ignorant of it. If you communicate well, you will be able to address customer needs pretty quickly, adapt to changes, and successfully improve products. Not to mention, DevOps has a proven track record of high reduction in downtime, enhanced security, and streamlined development and release process, ensuring nothing less than a competitive edge.
Top Benefits Offered by DevOps
Faster Delivery Time
As mentioned earlier, we are living in an era where you need to be fast enough or else you are completely doomed. The main principles of DevOps include automation, continuous delivery, and, of course, an instant feedback cycle, and these principles are the real reason why software development cycles incorporating DevOps are pretty much faster and highly efficient in comparison to other alternatives.
Easy Collaboration
In the current situation, development teams more than ever need to break down their inter-departmental silos and collaborate, and are asked to establish easy communication. And all this usually happens in a dynamic, round-the-clock environment, pretty insane, right? DevOps helps in enhancing agility by establishing a strong sense of collaboration, communication, and integration, ensuring on-time deliveries with the best possible outcomes.
Detecting Early Defects
The next benefit to take into account is the detection of early defects. The DevOps environment is well-known for fostering a knowledge-sharing culture; at the same time, aspects such as automated code, continuous monitoring, and continuous testing result in improved outcomes. Feedbacks are shared on an early basis so that defects are detected and resolved at a very early stage.
Of course, there are many other advantages such as accelerated time-to-resolution, better management of unplanned work, easy maintenance, cost-effectiveness, and so on, but the aforementioned ones are more than enough for you to pursue the concept. I guess now it’s time to simply implement. Here, down below, I would like to mention certain best practices to consider, which can definitely move your teams from siloed to in sync.
DevOps Best Practices to Consider
Agile Project Management
The first and foremost best practice to consider is establishing agile project management. Though agile itself is a strong and iterative approach where it is possible for teams to successfully deliver great value to customers in a quick manner, and of course, the amount of headaches is much less now. Agile teams are usually supposed to deliver work in smaller increments so they no longer have to worry about a single massive release date. With frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban, it is possible to ramp up flexibility and responsiveness. This leads to the development process being dynamic to ever-evolving requirements and delivering fast outcomes. So here you are, bound to receive rapid delivery and high-quality output.
Shift to a Collaboration and Communication-Driven Culture
The next best practice to consider for DevOps includes setting new cultural team expectations. In simple words, you need to be extremely sure that the technology and tools considered are absolutely right for the job. Here, you need to encourage regular meetings, set up knowledge-sharing sessions, and develop shared goals to ensure the establishment of seamless collaboration and remove the increasing scope of failure.
Here, it is advisable to promote values such as trust and empathy, and all you need to do is break down silos between teams and make them work successfully together to achieve a common goal.
Automate Tasks and Testing to Minimise Errors and Maximise Output
Automation has been a strong element here; in fact, it has been a key used to revolutionise a wide range of tasks, including development and testing. This definitely saves ample time and gives you the authority to mitigate errors. Routine tasks like code compilation, database migrations, and environment setups are automated. Here you get to kill two birds with one arrow. One, you get to save ample time, and second, since the tasks are automated, the scope of errors and risks automatically decreases. In addition, considering automated tests in continuous integration prevents new changes from breaking existing functionality.
More or less, automation speeds up development and delivery, allowing developers to focus on innovation and ensuring absolute consistency, and allowing us to develop highly reliable software, so you don’t simply meet the customer’s demand; you are more likely to exceed it.
Build Security with DevSecOps
The next best practice to consider is making the most of DevSecOps. Security breaches are happening every now and then, which has surely become a huge concern for every development company across the globe.
DevSecOps means that software development (Dev), IT operations (Ops), and security (Sec) are considered to enhance an organisation’s ability to deliver apps as well as services at a higher velocity. However, this doesn’t mean maintaining security.
This one is a set of practices, cultural approaches, and tools leading to the inception of secure development lifecycles and predetermined security patterns. So here you are, bound to receive automated security for automated operations.
Improve Efficiency with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery
Last but certainly not least, one is improving the overall efficiency of the development project by considering continuous integration and continuous delivery. Do you know what the purpose of the CI/CD pipeline is? Well, it is meant to lessen the overall risks that are highly associated, especially when a program is being implemented. However, DevOps highly supports the development of a release pipeline. There is a famous example to consider: Amazon recently switched to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, so it became possible for DevOps architects to seamlessly scale up and, at the same time, lower server capacity costs. This was done to switch to a continuous deployment procedure.
Parting Words
To be honest, conducting a successful software development lifecycle means you have to completely mess around with different tools and workflows. Well, DevOps on a large scale does assist well in simplifying and optimising these kinds of overwhelming development projects. The key is how you are implementing the concept. I hope the aforementioned pointers assist you well in your upcoming software development project.
Also, I understand the process is extremely exhaustive, so all the best practices incorporated here in the post are meant to be considered as the starting point, so that the process of implementing DevOps becomes a doable venture.
On and all, it is very crucial for you to know that DevOps is here to stay, and it’s high time teams are supposed to get their heads around especially if they are completely unaware of the DevOps space. Time to scale up as well as skill up. I hope you did find the following post insightful, and our purpose of helping you realise the significance of considering DevOps for your next software development project is a success.
In case you still have any doubts or queries, feel free to mention them in the comment section below. Good luck with the upcoming development project, and keep watching the space for more information and updates regarding the same.
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