What are the Best DevOps Implementation Practices?
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DevOps is not any tool instead just is just a methodology that has the ability to bring operation and developers teams together to transform the business strategy into a single operational entity. It can facilitate better communication, integration, and collaboration across various organization departments. It can significantly improve the agile performance of the IT department and team members. Basically, the concept of DevOps was introduced just to break down the traditional barriers between the two most imperative departments of any organization that are Development and Operations (hence the word evolved DevOps)
In this post, we will discuss this methodology of any business process that is adopted by many organizations and known as DevOps.
As discussed above, that DevOps is not a tool instead is just a methodology that can empower both Development and Operation departments. It focuses on cooperative communication between operations and developers and also involves those that are responsible for software deployment. The earlier development team has to deliver the software to operations and QA team to test and run it in the production model. As a result of neither the production nor operation teams effectively take responsibility for maintaining the delivering quality software.
The goal of DevOps was to empower these teams so that they can collaboratively take the responsibility of smooth, quick and continuous software deployment. Through proper communication between these departments the two teams can get integrated so that developers can focus just on coding part, even along with testing and production process and operation team can integrate feedback to development parallel for any required update, defect or performance issue. Ultimately the focus is to provide enhanced customer experience.
Initially, it may be quite challenging for the organizations to transform to DevOps methodology from traditional operation culture. To reduce any risk involves in this process, businesses at time instill certain DevOps procedures without any cultural shift within their organizational process. The continuous, quick, and reliable deployment can be achieved through DevOps implementation steps without recognizing the organic shift and nature.
It may be a challenge for business organizations to introduce DevOps into their workplace. Management and the deployment teams can collaborate on a formula that can help them in speeding up the deployment process. The deployment and management teams collaborate on that formula through which the transition process can be enabled and staged.
DevOps process and methodology helps in researching successes and deficiencies of deployment. It can relate the current challenges of delivery that can help the developers directly focusing on utilizing the DevOps process. The methodology can also be applied to analyze organizational needs that can delineate the operations. Below are some of the points that teams must explore for DevOp implementation:
When you get the answer of all of the above-listed questions, now is the time to implement DevOps for your organizational operations. For this, you can follow the below steps:
i). Implementation Plan Creation
Just like any new technology, DevOps also cannot successfully engage performance if not implemented without successful planning. Most of the companies implement DevOps without following any planned transition strategy. DevOps transition involves people, tools, and processes to support the development process. Here the biggest challenge is to establish the collaboration across departments, teams, or we can say throughout the organizations.
For proper planning, one must select realistic transition timelines and executable objectives. After that the teams can adjust the transformation timespans as per the required length of time for effective and organic evaluation of DevOps culture.
ii). Use Proper Metrics to Evaluate Meaningful DevOps Adoption
When the DevOps implementation analyst applies the proper metrics to the process, they can easily retrieve the clarity of fully organized DevOps methods. One can compare the anticipated outcomes with the actual results. Metrics can mirror the project extent to which the DevOps methodologies have been implemented. Iterative and continuous production, reflection, and discussion are the primary DevOps methods. A retrospective analysis to critically assess processes can promote the dynamic improvement of DevOps adoption process; here, the primary objective is timely pipeline delivery.
iii). DevOps Goal Alignment Across the Organization
As all DevOps participants work for the same goal, so the transformation culture due to DevOps must encourage the individual preferences and their collaborative choice for overriding considerations. Honest and candid participation of every member of the organization is imperative as it is directly related to the overall success of the project. Automation can also facilitate communication from remote locations as well.
iv). Implement DevOps Culture Before DevOps Tools
Just like any other process, DevOps also gets operated by the procedure. The procedure supports DevOps processes. The culture of cooperative communication fuels the project completion journey and procedure coordinates the collaborative determination. Organizations that focus on DevOps metrics and automation tools for the communication process can easily adopt reliable DevOps methods.
v). To Overcome the DevOps Culture Adoption
Systematic corrections and shared values can characterize the DevOps method and require the most challenging culture of the organizations. The extent of cultural transformation in production processes can determine the DevOps success within the organization. The DevOps process may require a completely managed business environment that can embrace the changes and supported executive management along with stakeholders. A cloud host can automate the DevOps method and provide a supportive automation environment. The cloud-based operation can manage the calculations within DevOps projects that can provide accurate and quick results.
As you might have understood the concept and role of DevOps in any organization, so now is the time to discuss some of the best practices for successful DevOps implementation. By following these practices, you can get better ROI and make the implementation successful, so here are those ones:
a). Determination of Infrastructure Need
Before getting into infrastructure restructuring process, understand the application requirement, and align your goals with the infrastructure designing process. The implementation should be business driven and for that infrastructure must be considered as well while implementing the new process in the organization. Some of the imperative concepts while considering infrastructure are:
Versioning Environment: Whenever you decide to implement DevOps be ready with an alternative solution or the versioning of the existing environment, it will help you to roll back if ever you require it. In case if your organization has multiple modules, then they are tightly coupled, then it may require a neat and clean plan to identify every patch and release.
Cycle Time: The cycle time for the software must be designed clearly and in a generic manner. You should also know all of your limitations and capabilities and if there is any downtime ever then know the exact time for that as well in advance.
Infra as a Code: Infra as the code does mean to have the solution that can address both of the above-listed needs that are cycle time (that must be minimum) and versioning environments that can be easily captured and addressed by managing and capturing the infrastructure as a code. Whatever you built should be suitable for long term requirement.
b). Do Not Try to Jump Start
Do not try to implement DevOps just in a single go or one cycle. Try to implement small patches by taking one entity and then apply your philosophy and validate it. When your POC gets justified, just start scaling the system and create the complete pipeline to define the complete process so that at any time you can easily go back and check what improvements are still required. Small successes can help you in gaining the internal confidence within your team, and you can build trust among your stakeholders and customers.
c). Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
The organizations that adopt DevOps must try to implement continuous integration and continuous delivery. This is all that DevOps is for. Even the beauty of DevOps is to deliver the applications frequently without disturbing any process and team, and all of this must be managed automatically. As far as continuous integration is concerned then you can understand the concept by this example, suppose you are part of the Agile team of your organization, obviously there will be multiple teams and modules that will be tightly coupled, and you will be part of those teams and even will be involved as well. Every day you will have to be submitting your private build to verify it and submit it to the build server. With every individual, it will be part of his daily routine as all of the work will have to be integrated into a common build area. Performing the regular build operation is known as continuous integration.
As far as continuous deployment is concerned, then it means to deploy every change as soon as it takes place. For this, you need to validate all builds of CI and make them ready for deployment at any time. By following some best practices, it can be easily done. The practices are:
d). Define Performance Benchmarking
One should do performance testing of every project and collect the benchmarking report for any latest build. The report must be shared with the team as it can easily justify the quality of the project, its build and infra as well. Verified build gives good confidence to the developer’s team, and when it is shared with the business team, then it can help them in planning their marketing strategies in a better manner.
e). Communication and Collaboration
Communication and collaborations are the keys and critical factors to make the DevOps implementation process successful. With good collaboration, business and development teams can understand the design and define a proper culture to their team. As a result, the development process can speed up development operations. Along with this, the sales and marketing teams can also align their goals and define their project implementation steps.
f). Documentation
You should develop the habit to document everything that is spread across the infrastructure and process along with the reports. By following change management and root cause analysis, you can see and identify all issues and make sure that whether they will be resolved in the next cycle or not. Even the production cycle must not be disturbed due to any change.
g). Keep an eye on Expenditure
Many cloud users have experienced that their bill keeps on increasing if they do not consider it and sometimes even tends to proportional to their growth rate in the business. As a solution to this problem conduct, regular audits may be once in two months to evaluate cloud computation. Make some changes in infra and do not spend more than 5 to 10% of the total cost. There are several online tools as well for this purpose you can also use them.
h) Make Your Infra Secure
In case if your teams face any compliance right from the DevOps implementation initiation, then you should not compromise with your data. For this, you can verify and know all the vulnerabilities. Moreover, even at the small stages, you must make sure the safety of data and for this, you can use the tools like SonarQube, CodeClimate, and many others.
i). Tool Compatibility
While selecting the tools for DevOps operation, select only compatible tools with the rest of the tools. As you have to capture every type of request, so must be equipped with appropriate tools as well. Whatever tool you need just download and configure that and determine that your process is working in the same manner.
A business that will consider and follow all of these best practices can create the right culture. A successful DevOps organization can free up its developers and help them in focusing what their real duty is, said by Rob Steward, Vice President of Product Development at Progress Software.
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