DevOps Best Practices – A comprehensive Guide for the beginners
DevOps can be defined as a development methodology for enterprise applications.
DevOps works
by creating an agile relationship that connects a company’s development team
and IT operations. Both business units are important for the success of a firm.
DevOps aims to enhance the relationship between them and improve
collaboration. DevOps isn’t just a trend. Trends come and go like tides and
waves, but it’s safe to say that DevOps is here to stay. You ask why? There are
numerous reasons firms need DevOps for better overall functioning. On that
note, let’s take a look at some reasons why we need DevOps. Traditional
development methodologies like the waterfall model lack speed. This is because
there’s no connection between the teams. When one team finishes its work, the
other team is just starting. Companies can create products at a faster pace with
DevOps in action. Also, the speed of making enhancements in products is high.
When you combine efforts by the development and operation teams, the
development cycles are shorter. Thus, this results in faster innovation and
brings teams ahead of their competitors. DevOps promotes frequent code versions
and makes it easy to detect defects in code. Thus, teams can avoid app failures
or defects. Even if a failure occurs, the recovery time is fast because both
development and operational teams share ideas. Better teamwork and coordination
lead to greater competencies. DevOps represents a change in IT culture,
focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean
practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people
(and culture), and it seeks to improve collaboration between operations and
development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially
automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic
infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.
Over the last
decade, DevOps has changed the way that engineering organizations work. Most
notably, it introduced a cultural shift that proved necessary for following the
agile method. DevOps helps to improve deployment frequency, reduce the failure
rate, shorten time to fixes, and speed up recovery time. In the 2020 Atlassian
DevOps Trends survey, 99 percent of respondents said that DevOps had a positive
impact on their organization.
DevOps Best Practices
Agile Software Development: Agile is a software development
and project management approach that helps teams deliver value to end-users
faster via actual customer and user feedback. Teams that follow the Agile
method aim to deliver in small increments. Every step of the process, including
requirements and plans, is continuously evaluated to help teams respond and
adjust as needed. DevOps emphasizes delivering reliable code faster,
engenders cross-team collaboration, and leverages automation. Agile focuses
mainly on workflow productivity tools (such as Kanban and Scrum), customer
requirements, and incremental progress. The idea of using agile in DevOps is to
achieve faster release cycles with improved reliability for the end user.
Continuous Integration (CI): Continuous integration is a
software development practice in which the source code is regularly merged into
a central repository. After the merge, automated builds and tests are run to
validate the quality of the code. The goal of continuous integration is to
find and address bugs earlier in the life-cycle, improve the overall code
quality, and maximize deployment efficiency. As teams improve the overall
process working in unison, the frequency will organically improve. Finding bugs
earlier in the development cycle helps teams avoid potentially bigger issues
once the code is released to production. Over time this also improves technical
debt.
Continuous Delivery (CD): Software deployment is a process that
spans build, validation, and version control to deployment and post-deployment.
Continuous delivery is a software development practice and an extension of
continuous integration. In CD, the development team produces the code in short
cycles, which can automatically be released at any time. Any changes in the
code are automatically built, tested, and released into production. In an
organization that has properly implemented continuous delivery, developers have
a deployment-ready build that has passed the standard test procedure. CD
enables an automated release process on top of automated testing, and you can
easily deploy with just a few clicks. This helps teams reduce the manual effort
when deploying because the framework improves the testing and review steps.
Ultimately this streamlines how code gets into production and then minimizes failure
because of the rigor applied across all steps.
Microservices: Microservices architecture is a
distributed application that combines multiple services, each performing a
particular feature or function. In the microservices architectural pattern,
each service can be deployed separately, run its own processes, and communicate
to the other services via a web interface. The different services within a
microservices architecture can be written using different languages or
frameworks, and deployed independently or as a group of services. What
makes microservices interesting is that they are closed and open at the same
time. The overall architecture is open for extension via the exposed interface
but closed for modification which can be implemented and versioned
separately. In a microservices architecture, it’s easier to remove a
single point of failure by ensuring that any issue in one service does not
impact another. Additionally, microservices are easier to scale as the DevOps
team can simply extend the functionality by adding a new microservice without
affecting the rest of the application.
Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the
practice of provisioning and managing a service’s infrastructure via coding and
employing software development techniques such as version control. IaC allows
teams to interact with the infrastructure programmatically instead of making
the configuration changes manually or through scripts. In other words, the
infrastructure in DevOps is treated the same as any other code. Since it is
defined by code, the infrastructure and its services can be swiftly deployed
using standardized patterns and updated with the latest patches and releases.
With IaC, DevOps teams can test their applications earlier in the development in
a production-like environment. The code is validated and tested to avoid common
deployment issues. Ideally, the DevOps teams expect to provision several
on-demand test environments in a reliable manner. Not only does IaC help them
avoid manual configuration, but it also enforces consistency. Teams who
implement IaC can deliver more stable environments rapidly, and at scale.
Configuration Management: Configuration management is the process
of managing the state of the system’s resources such as virtual machines (VM),
servers, and databases. By using configuration management tools, teams can
automate and standardize the otherwise manual configuration process. This
prevents the system admins from having to manually configure the operating
system, server software, and system apps. It also allows developers to roll out
changes in a systematic manner lowering the risk of accidentally modifying
system configuration. Configuration management is often used in
conjunction with infrastructure as a code. Templating the system definition and
configuration enables teams to operate complex environments at scale.
Version Control: Version control is the practice of
managing software code in versions. This helps the development team track
changes, and revisions, and makes it easy for developers to review and recover the
code. Version control is a fundamental DevOps practice and essential in DevOps
practices such as continuous integration (CI) and infrastructure as a
code. Usually, version control is implemented using Git, which allows
multiple developers to code in collaboration. Each developer works on their own
copy of the code and the changes made by any developer are not merged within
the master branch until it has been approved by the repository owner. This
clear process of merging the code changes in the same file makes it easy to
handle conflicts and roll back changes without affecting the codebase.
Continuous Monitoring: Continuous monitoring is another
critical DevOps practice. It means having complete visibility into the health
and performance of the overall application stack from infrastructure to the
high-level software components. The DevOps team utilizes a collection of
telemetry (event data and logs) from different parts of the
system. Continuous monitoring enhances the visibility of a system’s
operations, especially ones that can trigger security breaches. By having such
visibility, the DevOps team can set up alerts and work towards resolving issues
as they occur. Teams can also identify performance bottlenecks and resolve them
before they cause further potential damage.
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