You are currently viewing DevOps Best Practices: Enhance Your Development Workflow

DevOps Best Practices: Enhance Your Development Workflow

In an ever-evolving software development environment, DevOps has ended up with a critical approach to smoothen methods, enhance teamwork, and speedup delivery. By mixing development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps enables to shorten the systems development existence cycle, allowing common updates, capabilities, and fixes in alignment with business desires. 

This blog explains DevOps best practices which can enhance your workflow in development, and how SupportFly’s DevOps managed and consulting services can support you in implementing these practices.

What is DevOps? 

The term “DevOps” is a combination of two words ‘development’ and ‘operations’.DevOps exists between software development teams and IT operations teams. You have probably encountered hundreds of different definitions of DevOps but according to us DevOps is a collection of best practices that are implemented in the software development process or complete lifecycle for the improvement and more effective value delivery of the software.  

To enhance a team’s workflow and communication, it is important to align goals across teams and develop a shared responsibility and ownership. DevOps enables collaboration of development and operations teams to work together seamlessly from project start to finish. 

Why DevOps is Important?

You must be thinking Why is DevOps important? These best practices can enhance software quality. Implementing DevOps development and operation teams can collaborate more efficiently, cutting down on lead times and friction. They can test and integrate the code continuously. 

Additionally DevOps best practices provide several benefits includes:

  • It accelerates the development of software enabling a quick time to market, which can be crucial in this competitive digital economy.
  • It can increase the overall customer experience reducing errors in software.
  • By reducing effort duplication and automating repetitive tasks, it boosts productivity.
  • It promotes a transparent and collaborative culture, which can boost morale and output within the team.

DevOps 10 Best Practices to Enhance Your Workflow

Using cutting-edge techniques and visually appealing tools is only one aspect of DevOps best practices; another is enhancing organizational efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. These guidelines can help your company grow by organizing staff, encouraging collaboration, and optimizing workflow.

Here we are going to explore 10 DevOps best practices to enhance your workflow: 

1. Encourage a Collaborative Culture

    For a successful journey, you must first and foremost focus on developing a culture that encourages free communication and eliminates fear of failure. When it comes to implementing DevOps techniques, teams and organizations that prioritize ethical values like empathy and trust are typically ahead of the curve. Dismantle silos between teams and encourage collaboration to achieve a common goal that will benefit the values of the business. 

    2. Continuous Integration and Delivery 

      Integrating small batches of code into a central code repository is the best practice that provides effective developer collaboration. With this method, the repository is always kept in good condition, we introduce smaller changes that are easy to manage. 

      Since these small batches of changes are constantly verified using automated builds and tests, continuous integration (CI) makes it possible to identify errors early on and enhances the quality of the code. 

      The process of continuously bringing the code into a deployable state for each small batch of changes is known as continuous delivery(CD). This streamlines our deployment processes and gives our developers a simple, automated way to release code into production.

      2. Setting-Up Automated Testing

        As an extension of the previous point, building up and selecting relevant automated tests for our CI/CD pipelines is essential to the success of DevOps. In this approach, we automate tests to run on every small change made to our code, eliminating the need to perform manual testing on it.

        It lower our risk of introducing bugs into production systems by increasing the number and frequency of tests. The tests can include unit testing, integration testing, end-to-end testing, load testing, smoke testing, and other tests, depending on the use case.

        3. Put Observability on Priority and Find Appropriate Measures

          DevOps best practices are based on receiving feedback and enhancing our procedures. To do so, we need to identify and monitor the appropriate metrics and measures so that we can assess our performance.

          The goals and primary outcomes targeted will determine how these metrics vary from team to team and from organization to organization. It’s an important practice to succeed. DevOps metrics examples include things like deployment time, frequency of deployments, deployment failure rate, availability of vital services, cost per unit, code coverage, mean time to detect, mean time to restore, and change lead time.

          Next, we need to focus on the ability to observe our software and applications in production when they are running. To resolve problems quickly, it makes our systems easier to understand, and to support our teams in their work, we must devise a plan for efficiently gathering, organizing, and dispersing the logs, traces, and metrics of our apps. 

          4. Reduce Human Intervention

            By avoiding manual work and automating repetitive tasks, DevOps accelerate our processes and provide increased consistency to the results. By reducing human interference and time spent on manual work, automation can free us up to concentrate on what really matters. It also eliminates misunderstandings and human errors, boosts team productivity, and increases confidence in our systems and procedures. 

            6. Include Security In initial stages of development 

              When it comes to integration with security in software development, it shouldn’t be put in last. DevSecOps has importance on considering application and infrastructure security early in the development process, building security into the blueprint, and integrating it with the pipelines for continuous integration and deployment. 

              Throughout the whole lifecycle, security should be the responsibility of multiple teams and be considered as an essential component of the workflow rather than an add-on. Because of an increase in malicious attacks over the past few years, securing the software supply chain has received a lot of attention lately.

              7. Learn from incidents and build process

                Incidents are not avoidable. No matter how well-prepared your team is, an incident will naturally arise that you need to manage. It’s important to focus on blameless communication, comprehend the problem, interact with the parties involved in an effective manner, and work together to find a solution. 

                Building a process to record incidents and draw lessons from them is just as important as solving the problem. Once the incident has been addressed, take some time to discuss how the incident was managed and create a post-incident review with your team. Look for ways to make the incident handling procedure better so that it will benefit you in the future. 

                8. Prioritize Concepts, Then Tools

                  The DevOps landscape is changing very quickly with the new tools and services appearing every day. Focus on comprehending the fundamental ideas that enable organizations to leverage DevOps practices to accelerate business growth, instead of constantly integrating new tools and services. 

                  You’ll be able to choose the appropriate tools if you once comprehend the fundamental concepts and prioritize the missing pieces appropriately. Remember that you cannot build everything within your team. When it makes sense, it’s acceptable to depend on managed services and DevOps tooling. 

                  Use your team’s time wisely, make an effort to comprehend the needs and expertise within your organization, build custom tooling when appropriate, and rely on outside services and tools for everything else. 

                  9. Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 

                    Similar to application code, cloud infrastructure should be considered as a fundamental component of software development lifecycle. By using infrastructure as code(IaC), we can apply software development best practices, like version control and continuous integration/continuous delivery, to the building of infrastructure. 

                    This approach improves our automation efforts throughout the IT landscape by doing away with the need for human resource setup and configuration via user interfaces. Any changes are transparent and auditable, and in the event of a problem, we can rapidly restore infrastructure systems to their prior state. 

                    Further, push for a self-service infra model rather than creating yet another bottleneck by waiting for cloud infrastructure engineers to produce the required resources. Developers and others in need of infrastructure resources can use this model’s tools to create the necessary components. In this manner, we use a single workflow to boost output and speed while granting our developers autonomy.

                    10. Practice for Effective Information Sharing and Documentation

                      Effective information sharing within a company and practicing a collaborative environment are prerequisites for the successful implementation of DevOps. Unfortunately, in software development teams, avoiding documentation and effective information exchange is all too common. When done correctly, documentation can be a useful resource for developers. 

                      Make an effort to include documentation tasks in team backlogs and treat documents as valuable assets in your company. Documents should be updated frequently, produced consistently, and made available to anyone who requires them because they are dynamic. 

                      How SupportFly Can Help in DevOps Managed Services and Consulting

                      Implementing these DevOps best practices may be challenging without the right understanding of procedures and assets. SupportFly offers comprehensive DevOps managed services and consulting to help you get an enhanced development workflow. Our DevOps Managed and consulting services include DevOps Implementation, DevOps Consulting services, App Containerization, Cloud Infrastructure Services, and AWS & Azure DevOps Services with following benefits.

                      • Expert Consultation: We have a team of skilled DevOps consultants who can manual you in enforcing quality practices tailored to your specific desires.
                      • Managed Services: We provide end-to-end managed DevOps services, from putting in CI/CD pipelines to dealing with infrastructure and tracking systems.
                      • Customized Solutions: Get customized solutions that align together with your business and technical requirements.
                      • 24/7 Support: Benefit from round-the-clock help to ensure your systems are continuously running easily.

                      Conclusion

                      DevOps best practices are crucial for enhancing your software development workflow with collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. By implementing these above best practices together with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure as Code(IaC), and effective monitoring, you may achieve quicker and extra dependable software program delivery.

                      Partner with us to simplify your DevOps journey. Invest in DevOps today to streamline your workflows, improve collaboration, and deliver outstanding software faster. Contact us to find out how their DevOps managed and consulting services can revolutionize your development procedures.