The success of a company’s IT strategy depends on the ability to make both development and operations teams work at their best. DevOps practices were created to optimize these activities: it is a methodology for optimizing modern software development processes designed to increase synergy between the Dev (developers) team and the Ops (operations) team, which are usually separate and used to working with almost no communication.
It is a cultural change, as well as an operational one, that allows you to radically improve the application’s time-to-market, increase productivity, and reduce operational costs. Today these are no longer optional requirements to be competitive in the market.
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For the collaboration between the two teams to be effective, it is necessary to follow a set of rules and best practices: let’s look at 6 good practices for successfully adopting DevOps in your company.
Best practice 1: Automated testing
Testing is essential throughout the entire software development lifecycle to release quality code and products; in agile practices, TDD (Test Driven Development) is one of the pillars.
DevOps promotes automated testing from the early stages, allowing developers to identify and resolve potential issues during development rather than at a later stage of the software lifecycle.
What are the benefits of automated testing?
- More frequent tests: compared to manual testing, automated testing allows you to run more tests without committing team resources
- More reliable tests: the risk of human error decreases significantly
- More complex tests: by automating the testing phase, it is possible to perform tests with a complexity that would be difficult for operators to manage
- Better use of human resources: team members can focus on non-automatable, higher-value activities
Best practice 2: CI/CD and automation
The practices of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) are specifically about automating QA processes. This practice allows the team to integrate and deploy their code “continuously,” meaning with extreme frequency, without waiting for downstream operators to complete costly review phases and without delegating responsibility. Automated tests can include end-to-end, unit, integration, security and performance tests, and even visual consistency tests.
In general, automation is essential for DevOps: every repeatable process can be automated, leaving developers the energy and time to create business value.
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Best practice 3: Anticipate problems
A team that cares about quality tries to identify defects as early as possible: the sooner a problem is known, the sooner it can be addressed.
Instead of producing code in large quantities and quickly, delegating the responsibility of discovering defects to a separate QA team (only to have code sent back for fixes, making any planning completely pointless), developers write procedures to independently test the code they create.
These procedures can then be automated, and automation significantly reduces testing costs.
Best practice 4: Monitoring
A DevOps team focused on delivering value delegates the monitoring of automation results to software tools.
The task of these integration tools is to immediately notify in case of a broken build or a failed test, so that developers can resolve those issues, avoiding delivery delays or (worse) delivering software with defects.
Automation greatly improves development speed, but if an error occurs in an automated process and no one knows about it, you might as well do the work manually. Likewise, it is important to monitor production applications in order to identify failures or performance shortcomings before end users notice them.
Best practice 5: Observability
With the shift from on-premise monolithic applications and systems to Cloud Native applications based on microservices, monitoring becomes significantly more complex.
If a problem occurs in a network of microservices, how can we trace it? How can we follow the cause-and-effect chain quickly and with confidence? That’s why observability is such a hot topic today. The three pillars of observability are said to be logs, tracing, and metrics.
- Logs are generated by most system components and applications and consist of chronological records of system or application behavior.
- Tracing tracks the logic within the application, allowing it to be retraced in case of problems.
- Metrics represent the usage of resources such as CPU, RAM, disk space, network connectivity over time, as well as response times, execution speed, etc.
Observability simply means using all three of these information sources in an aggregated way to analyze and predict the behavior of a complex system, which would otherwise be impossible to manage with confidence.
Best practice 6: Collect continuous feedback
A continuous flow of feedback ensures that team members have all the information they need to do their work in a timely and relevant manner.
From a development perspective, this means that the team is immediately notified of problems during the integration or delivery phase. It also means that clear and thorough test results must be made available to developers as quickly as possible.
From a product management perspective, the team is informed of production errors, performance shortcomings, or bugs reported through channels that allow tracking this information so it doesn’t get lost in the chaos.
In general, people tend to think they have to choose between quality and speed. Embracing constant and transparent feedback is one of the DevOps elements that makes it possible, over time, to achieve both results.
Conclusion
DevOps practices are incremental: a radical change in one day is not necessary. It’s better to implement them gradually.
Cultural changes in companies essentially require three things: a well-structured chronological plan, the right communication approach to explain it, and the time needed to implement it — that is, to allow people to accept change naturally. From this perspective, DevOps best practices serve as a guide that indicates which operational goals to achieve.
