How to Achieve DevOps Success Through Automated Feedback Loops

Have you ever been in a situation where your IT manager alerts you of a problem in a production environment and wants instant answers to the questions "What is the problem?", "How long will it take to fix?", and "Why did this happen?". If so, you know this can be a frustrating place to be in and can result in chaos of trying to get all the right people in a war room to solve the problem.

DevOps has been a practice implemented by various companies to try to solve this problem but how does DevOps actually help solve this? Let me introduce you to one of the core concepts of DevOps called "feedback loops". Without feedback loops, you may experience bugs that find their way up to production.

It has been said that in order to truly have good continuous delivery of software you must have good continuous testing. There are various types of testing for insuring quality software which your QA team can help setup. Types of testing include, but are not limited to, code quality scans, automated regression testing, functional testing, security code scans, and load testing.

For each of theses tests there are various types of tools that provide automation. For example, when testing code quality you can use a tool called Sonarqube, when performing automation testing you can use Selenium / TestRail, when running automated security scans you can use HP Fortify / Whitehat Scout, and when running load tests you can use LoadRunner / JMeter / Gatling. By using these tools you will get feedback quicker and establish faster feedback loops as you promote code up through your environments. Also there are tools that monitor server logs such as Splunk, Loggly, or ELK Stack. These tools can be used to setup alerts or reports for developers. These reports could include lists of errors such as Null Pointer errors, SQL errors, etc.

DevOps is also a culture change. Each business will establish DevOps in their IT department differently. It is important to find out what team structures, processes, and methods work best for you. To learn the pros and cons of each DevOps team structure check out the following website: https://web.devopstopologies.com/

In conclusion, if you want to establish quality DevOps in your IT organization, setup automated feedback loops to insure code quality and good health of your applications.

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