DevOps Best Practices

Standards and best practices vary across companies. Even different teams within the same company don’t adopt all the same practices.

As long as the practices adopted are helping the company deliver better software faster, the goal of DevOps is achieved.

In order to adopt DevOps, these practices should be adopted.

Developers Should Be Involved in Operations:

• When developers are involved in Operations as part of a holistic and integrated team, they step out of their enclosed development environments and into the real world of production systems where their code is designated to run.
• By doing so, they can have a keen awareness of how changes in the code may affect the production infrastructure and make sure that changes to the code, as versions are delivered, do not have an adverse effect.

Operations Should Be Involved in Development:

• When Operations are aware of code changes that are planned for development, they can anticipate how they might affect production infrastructure and ensure that developers consider factors such as hardware constraints, monitoring, deployment, troubleshooting, security, and tooling needed for production systems.

Version Control Everything:

• In a DevOps environment the concept of “code” is extended to everything that is involved in production systems.
• So in addition to source code, you should version control software and hardware configuration files, settings, parameters, and anything else that takes part in your runtime systems.

Automate Everything:

• Manual tasks and processes are error-prone and not scalable.
• Every change should undergo automation as part of a CI/CD pipeline. Everything that can be automated, should be automated.
• This includes automated deployment processes, automated testing procedures, and more.

Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment:

• Any modification to the software delivery pipeline, from development to production systems, must be accompanied by a CI/CD system. This ensures that if anything goes wrong, there is a quick feedback loop that leads to a rapid recovery.

Unified Tools and Platforms:

• Development, Staging, and Production environments should use the same tools, configuration, and hardware resources to the greatest extent possible.
• This is to ensure that anything that works in development will transition successfully to the staging and production systems.