Essencial DevOps Principles and Practices to Simplify Your SDLC

Automation of Repetitive Tasks

At the heart of DevOps methodologies lies automation. To accelerate the software development lifecycle & release updates frequently, there needs to be a system in place that ensures such rapid delivery. DevOps automation is all about using the right tools & coding techniques to negate manual coding & minimize the need for manual tasks.

Application update release/deployment & code integration are performed using automation tools as a result of DevOps implementation. There are automation tools that can be used during all the phases of the DevOps lifecycle. Tools like Asana, Gitlab, & Jira are used during the planning phase whereas Github & CFEngine are used for the build processes.

Depending on your organization structure & working environment, you can decide the toolchain needed for the automation of the workflow.

Collaboration & Team Spirit

DevOps teams work in a collaborative atmosphere, sharing insights & growing together as a single team. The development, operations, & security teams work hand-in-hand to solve critical challenges & attain business goals.

Collaboration is one of the key DevOps principles and it is achieved when each team has knowledge of the other teams’ tasks & dependencies. Proper communication channels must be established to enforce quality collaboration as the development teams & operation teams are in a constant loop of each team’s proceedings.

The DevOps model ensures that the development teams get to know what happens in the production environment & likely come up with suggestions for deploying releases faster. The collaborative spirit also helps reduce risk failures associated with every phase, thus improving MTTR rates.

Customer-centric Development

One of the key reasons why Amazon, the mega eCommerce marketplace has excelled marvelously under the brilliant leadership of its founder, Jeff Bezos, is its customer-centric approach.

Not just Amazon, but other reputable digital companies such as Netflix, eBay, etc. are so successful in their product/service launches as they place customers at the heart of software development.

We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards. The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company. – Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon

The DevOps implementation roadmap is all about introducing new feature updates, product releases, etc. to consistently improve the customer experience. There’s never a bar fixed which hinders the improvement of software development practices to incorporate functionality/features to satisfy customer interests.

Shared End-to-end Responsibility

A predominant issue that IT teams faced previously, upon adoption of traditional waterfall software development practices, was that particular teams were put into question when inefficiencies occurred. Since the teams worked separately, either one of the teams was held responsible for the lack of performance & other production-related inefficiencies.

One of the key DevOps principles is the sharing of end-to-end responsibility by DevOps teams for the entire DevOps lifecycle phases. No single team is ever blamed for a specific downfall as throughout the development process & deployment phase, all teams work together in synchronized harmony.

System administrators don’t get to blame the development team & development team doesn’t get to blame them for failed configuration management. To implement DevOps successfully, shared responsibility is a necessary factor.

Envisioning the End-goal

Software delivery & integration processes can be carried out effectively only when DevOps teams have crystal-clear clarity of what is to be achieved. Both the development and operations teams need to have a sound idea of the end goal & the entire vision of the software development.

Having the goal in mind helps to steer smoothly across obstacles encountered along the way while ensuring continuous deployment. It also helps the operations team to identify priorities early on & support the entire development team with all the infrastructure needed.

Ensuring a collaborative environment & envisioning the end goal during development will lead to a successful DevOps workflow. The QA team can also fix bugs & run automated tests effectively when they know what exactly is required.

Frequent & Incremental Software Releases

Incremental software releases are one of the main practices of DevOps methodologies. When businesses are keen on developing & launching software that’s of value to the customers, it’s necessary to minimize risks while counting on an effective customer response.

Traditionally siloed teams didn’t have the privilege of releasing software incrementally as they followed the waterfall model. Whereas, DevOps teams rely on continuous integration that helps to modify code consistently & be respondent to customer interests.

When software is released incrementally, it allows for stable operating environments & necessitates a healthy deployment cycle. It’s one of the key principles of DevOps that ensures the incorporation of new features now and then. The source code is always developed to get the best benefit out of the software product.

Measure KPIs & Transform Feedback

When incorporating DevOps principles of continuous code management, it’s necessary to take note of the key performance indicators (KPIs) & work on improving the results. All DevOps engineers & quality assurance analysts must be keen on measuring the software performance consistently to derive the best results.

While facilitating incremental releases, feedback needs to be collected to enhance the quality of existing code & meet customer requirements. The collective response of all DevOps teams concerning feedback incorporation will result in a steady deployment environment.

Team meetings must be held regularly to discuss customer feedback & map out strategies/methods to incorporate them effectively. With deliberate efforts & evaluation, DevOps teams can achieve great results in software development.

Managing Workflows via Version Control

One of the key principles of DevOps is to keep track of all the changes that have been made to the software ever since its first release & iteration. DevOps engineers use a version control system to keep records of software files via snapshots. It automatically takes a snapshot of code, saving time for developers & managing all versions of software while presenting a single version at a time.

All DevOps teams stay on the same page by using version control as they can see all the real-time code changes. It enables teams to scale up, work collaboratively & manage their workflows. Teams can study their progress & go through the bugs they encountered at a stage & the new features incorporated into the code.

Version control helps resolve conflicts between teams while working on the code as every team has the same presentation of the code files. DevOps engineers also use version control automation features to automate code analysis & deploy code effectively.

Agile Planning

Without a well-defined plan consisting of strategies & methods that overlook the success of the DevOps pipeline, it’s not possible to attain business goals. To successfully manage a DevOps project, a concrete plan needs to be framed including the number of software releases/increments, the budget cost of the entire project, and a fixed deadline.

This plan forms the foundation for effective resource allocation, progress tracking, and ensuring the project remains on track and within budget. Priorities need to be sorted out in the planning phase of the DevOps lifecycle to decide the tools, infrastructure, & cloud resource allocation.

Continuous Integration & Delivery

The CI/CD pipeline is all about the continuous integration of code to enhance the software quality & deploy it effectively. When a continuous workflow is ensured, disruptions or inefficiencies are less prone to arise.

Predominance is given to the quality ‘continuity’ in the DevOps community. A cultural shift is required to adopt the practice of CI/CD & ensure the continuous improvement of your software projects. The continuous delivery approach includes the merger of the entire software lifecycle processes.

Continuous Deployment

DevOps engineers & teams adopt continuous deployment practices to launch software iterations effectively without disrupting the performance. Several automation tools such as Azure Resource Manager, and Google Cloud Deployment Manager are used to deploy software continuously.

In this approach, the Ops team has to be very attentive to the system & infrastructure configurations as there’s a continuous process of deployment.

Continuous Monitoring

The heavy inflow of continuous integration & continuous delivery practices is what makes continuous monitoring (CM) a healthy DevOps practice. CM ensures that all security threats to the software development cycle are identified & rectified.

There are various types of continuous monitoring practices such as infrastructure monitoring, network monitoring, & application performance monitoring. When CM is performed with due diligence, DevOps teams can develop world-class applications while avoiding security risks & data breaches.

Infrastructure as a Code (IaC)

To facilitate effective continuous delivery of software, the deployment environment must be stable. Earlier, in the traditional waterfall approach, teams had to maintain deployment settings individually for different environments. This caused a lot of inefficiencies & that’s why Infrastructure as a code (IaC) was developed.

With IaC DevOps practices, infrastructure is managed & provisioned via properly-documented code. The code contains the infrastructure specifications, ensuring the distribution of the same environment every time.

Containerization

The process of packaging all the essential components of an application such as its software environment, dependencies, & configuration files into an isolated container is called containerization. It fits into the rulebook of DevOps practices as it helps to deploy software effectively & consistently across multiple production environments.

Deployment velocity is increased when DevOps teams build software with a containerization architecture. Containers being lightweight, can be easily transferred between teams & foster healthy collaboration.

Microservices

All modern IT teams adopting DevOps methodologies use the microservices architecture to build a distributed application comprising individual business logic components that perform specific functions. These microservices are internally connected via APIs that help to necessitate the application functionality.

With microservice deployment, DevOps teams can significantly enhance the velocity with which software releases are made. Containerization is used to isolate & package microservices.

Cloud Infrastructure

What makes a DevOps lifecycle successful is the smoothness of the entire development & deployment process. This is possible only when cloud technologies & infrastructure are used.

Cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS, provide the necessary infrastructure, resources, & storage space needed to facilitate top-notch software development.

With pay-as-you-go models, IT organizations just have to pay for the resources & infrastructure they use. This minimizes budget constraints & maximizes the efficiency of software development, which is integral to the DevOps culture.