Every company dream of a smooth process delivering high profits and productivity, and DevOps enters the domain as the new IT buzzword. DevOps appearance has made everyone think about approaches, changing or transforming the IT sector into the advanced one. This curiosity of IT leaders, however, has helped them understand this term deeply to develop new approaches, which makes their work easier and helps them achieve better results. In the starting phase of the DevOps adoption, teams can design strategies with ease, but with each level up, it might become difficult to manage it. Before moving with the pillars of DevOps best practices, let’s first understand the term DevOps and Its importance to businesses.

What is DevOps and How is it Beneficial for Businesses?

The term DevOps is often referred to as a business process or development methodology enhancing development and operations teams’ communication and collaboration alongside speeding up the software delivery without compromising its quality. It is also called a transformation of the work environment for the development teams and businesses from their legacy approaches. To achieve a complete DevOps transformation, organizations must have an idea of business structure and processes to improve business productivity. Also Read: Defeating DevOps Challenges with Cloud Desktop Integration According to the DevOps survey of Atlassian in 2020, around 99% of organizations has experienced the positive impact of DevOps adoption on their business processes. Further, they also stated that DevOps not only reduces time-to-market but also improves the software quality. After knowing these benefits of DevOps, you must be thinking to create DevOps best practices. In order to do so, you should consider some DevOps measures and pillars priorly. In this blog, we have mentioned top-7 prior DevOps considerations that can help you to conduct gap analysis for your DevOps best practices.

Leadership Management:

Great leadership can avail a long-term vision for both team and organizational collaboration. Leaders are the pillars of delivering effective DevOps solutions or services, helping employees to focus on their work and objectives. Leadership management is the best practice for any DevOps development.

Ensuring Collaborative Culture:

A collaborative culture enhances cross-functional efficiencies and eliminates confusion between Developers, Operators, and QAs, through platforms like Slack, Yammer, Teams, etc. The DevOps systems are designed by experts and reviewed & changes suggested by stakeholders (e.g., Dev, Ops, and QA). Plus, the KPIs are set through a collaborative decision of teams of developers, operators, and quality assurance engineers.

Ensuring Continuous Integration:

Once DevOps teams make all suggested changes, they should integrate changes with the source code. They also need to ensure that the source code can be aligned by SVM systems, like Git, Mercurial, Perforce, among many others. Plus, continuous integration with source code after each change is kept separate in branches to control software updates for each software version release. In DevOps, all development segments are designed for making it proactive to merge the changes automatically with genuine sources. DevOps always ensures the availability of demanded resources with prior access and resistive nature towards blocking the building process. The Continuous integration function of DevOps boosts integration processes and scales development on-demand.

Ensuring Continuous Testing:

In DevOps, all processes, like development, testing, integration, and monitoring, work simultaneously. When a new change or unit appears on its platform, it is necessary to test it during the development and integrate it into the separate branch parallelly. Once the overall integration is done, they are sent for the final testing process. The test script standards ensure the performance and maintenance of the test creation. Here, the tests are scheduled automatically in accordance with software changes. Continuous testing is operated dynamically with the demanded test resources as per the complexity of the software changes. Apparently, in this, around 85% of tests are automated, and others are assisted automatically whenever performed manually. Further, it ensures that the application performance is not degraded at all with the automated release performance tests. For the quality analysis after the second last test, it is advisable to perform Blue/green or A/B testing methods with the selected audience to check the code effectiveness. The test suites automate the particular set for each phase as per the predetermined criteria. Also read: 8 Effective Continuous Testing Pillars of DevOps

Ensuring Continuous Monitoring:

Continuous data logging, such as snapshot and results of each pipeline metric, and alert systems always simplify detecting issues and enable dev, Ops, and QA teams to correct those mistakes as early as possible. And this type of automatic logging can be done through KPIs for DevOps components. Process analytics are used to monitor and enhance the CI, CT, and CD processes and drive overall process improvements. There is also a need for predictive analytics to dynamically align the configurations of the DevOps pipeline. This logging data also indicates an area with the maximum failure chances for test results analysis.

Integrating Security Practices:

Developers are responsible for creating security level development by leveraging automation of security assurance and monitoring processes. To automate the security processes, organizations should ensure the availability of all information in the security platforms via APIs. Verified version control tools and practices are used for the DevOps environments’ software, blueprints, scripts, and templates. DevOps security controls are automated through the CI/CD pipeline to maintain the platform's agility. It is important to ensure the intellectual property of the project's source code is only accessible to authorized users. Plus, intellectual property should be divided into clusters and each with different credentials.

Ensuring Continuous Delivery:

The delivery stage operates the deployment pipeline, which makes it a completely separate stage. Each component that phases through delivery metrics is packed into containers and prepared with sufficient configurations and test resources for the deployment stage. In this, configuration management tools are used for information management. Each deployment decision is influenced by its predetermined metrics and usually takes a few hours or less than a day to process it completely. From ideation, deployments to the whole production environments are designed to identify and isolate the failed deployments from the customers’ side and enable self-healing capabilities to get instant recovery.

Conclusion:

DevOps enables organizations with many benefits, such as achieving performance efficiencies through its best practices and offering seven measures. However, getting the best out of DevOps capability requires the assistance of DevOps experts. CloudStakes Technology Pvt. Ltd. - the best DevOps services company in India that contains an in-house team of expert DevOps engineers providing the best-in-class DevOps solutions that will enhance overall business efficiencies.