Top 10 DevOps Best Practices

DevOps is a software development and IT operations methodology that combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to work collaboratively throughout the software lifecycle. Companies have adopted this development philosophy in the past decade, but we must consider the Top 10 DevOps Best Practices to do so accurately. To accomplish this we can integrate automation, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and monitoring.

Top 10 DevOps Practices

DevOps Best Practices

Regarding the top 10 DevOps best practices, the focus is on improving collaboration and automating processes while ensuring security and reliability in software development and delivery. Here are some key best practices that can help you optimize your DevOps pipeline:

Automation: Automation has proliferated in the industry, allowing the possibility of DevOps to exist. Automate the build, test, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning processes to speed up workflows and reduce human error.

Use CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) to ensure code changes are automatically tested and deployed, minimizing manual intervention.

We can use tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI, and Terraform. These will help us set CI/CD pipelines and deploy new versions of the code while things get developed.

Shift Left, this philosophy integrates security early into the DevOps lifecycle (this is known as DevSecOps). Rather than treating security as an afterthought, address vulnerabilities during development and testing.

Implement automated security testing such as static analysis, dynamic analysis, and dependency scanning.

We can use some of the following tools to scan the code being deployed inside the pipeline before it gets to production. Snyk, OWASP ZAP, and SonarQube.

Continuous Integration (CI) Implement continuous integration to merge code changes frequently (several times daily). This helps identify bugs early, enhances collaboration, and maintains high-quality code.

Each change should trigger an automated build and test process to catch errors before they reach production.

Some tools that can be used to achieve continuous integration are Jenkins, Travis CI, and GitHub Actions.

Continuous Delivery (CD) Continuous delivery ensures that the codebase is always in a deployable state. Automate the deployment pipeline to reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and speed up release cycles.

Implement a “one-click” deployment process to quickly and safely push code to production.

To achieve such continuous delivery, we can use tools like Spinnaker, Octopus Deploy, and Kubernetes. These tools will help us integrate the infrastructure as part of the deployments to achieve the rapid “one-click” deployments.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Manage and provision infrastructure using code to improve consistency, speed up provisioning, and reduce the risk of human error. This practice also makes it easier to scale and manage resources.

Ensure all infrastructure (e.g., servers, databases, networks) is version-controlled, enabling easy replication and rollback.

This can be achieved by using document-defined deployments like Terraform, Ansible, and AWS CloudFormation.

Collaboration and Communication: Foster a collaborative culture between development, operations, and security teams, which is the core of the DevOps concept. The goal is to break down silos and ensure everyone is working toward the same goal of delivering high-quality software quickly.

Chat tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams and project management tools like Jira are used to ensure transparent and continuous communication.

Encourage pair programming, code reviews, and cross-team knowledge sharing.

Monitoring and Logging: Continuous monitoring and logging are essential for detecting real-time issues and improving system reliability. Collect logs and metrics from your applications, servers, and databases to analyze performance, availability, and security.

Use monitoring tools to catch anomalies and proactively address issues before they impact users. Depending on the customer base or the application size, it might take some time to receive feedback from our customers. Nevertheless, to ensure that we have the fastest and most effective development, we must ensure that we have some rapid reaction to errors.

If we detect an issue introduced to the code three versions down the road, it will complicate its correction. We can use things like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, and New Relic to monitor logs.

Version Control for Everything Store all code (including infrastructure code, configuration files, and documentation) in version control systems. This ensures consistency, traceability, and the ability to roll back changes quickly when necessary.

Git repositories (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) are commonly used to manage source code, configurations, and infrastructure as code.

Use feature branches and pull requests for better collaboration as a best practice.

Failure Recovery and Rollback Plans Develop strategies for failure recovery to minimize downtime and data loss—Automate rollback procedures to quickly revert to the previous stable version if an issue occurs.

Implement canary releases or blue/green deployments to minimize risk when deploying to production.

You can use tools like Kubernetes for orchestration and Spinnaker for continuous delivery.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) Implement Test-Driven Development (TDD) to ensure that all the code is properly tested before it is integrated into the application.

Automate unit, integration, and functional testing to improve code quality and minimize defects.

Tools: JUnit, Selenium, TestNG, and Cypress.

DevOps allows the organization to develop much more agile and automated software. This increased development speed requires the consistent integration of development and deployments. Here, automation and infrastructure as a code become key players. In most medium- and large-size companies, this is becoming the norm.

In the upcoming years, we should expect progress to continue in this direction as it allows for increased control over the development cycle, infrastructure, and product quality.  Therefore, it is crucial to keep these Top 10 DevOps Best Practices in mind.

Sources:

Transforming Your Organization with DevOps: Proven Best Practices for Unparalleled Success – U Devs – Custom Web Development, PHP, WordPress, React, NodeJS. https://www.u-devs.com/blog/transforming-your-organization-with-devops-proven-best-practices-for-unparalleled-success/

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