During the pandemic, we saw companies make moves.. Fast. They were able to match the market’s demands and give the customers what they needed within a very short span of time. If your company leverages DevOps services, you can easily streamline the development, deployment, management and maintenance of software at scale.
What is DevOps?
Well DevOps is basically a set of principles that define what a devops culture would look like. The main objective of engaging with DevOps services is to speed up the time to market, apply incremental improvements in response to feedback from the customers, and create a more streamlined development process.
If you are looking for hiring devops specialists or devops service providers, or if you want to incorporate devops culture into your organisation, then implement these 7 practices.
The 7 key practices of DevOps are:
Continuous Integration
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Delivery
Configuration and Change Management
Communication
Automated Testing
Continuous Monitoring
Let’s look at them 1 by 1.
Continuous Integration - Continuous Integration is part of the CI/CD DevOps pipeline. This helps us ensure a high-quality software. DevOps specialists use continuous integration to make sure that the development team commits the code in the version control repository like Github multiple times. CI is then used for automated build, test, validation of code quality. This can be done either hourly or daily depending on the changes in the code.
Continuous Deployment - Continuous deployment is the second part of CI/CD pipeline. Here devops specialists automate the deployment of code in production environments. CD consists of Development, builds, testing, build-testing, deployment, and post-deployment management. There are a number of tools that devops service providers use for CD such as Harness, Spinnaker, Ansible, Jenkins, puppet, and chef, etc.
Continuous Delivery - This refers to the automated way of testing the codebase and deploying the codes that pass into production. It’s an approach to code approval and delivery approval that ensures that the code can be deployed automatically with the needed approvals. The same process is also implemented in other environments like QA, UA, etc. This devops service enables less production failure risk, faster delivery, and with no manual deployments.
Configuration and Change management - Configuration management includes automation of managing, configuring, monitoring, and maintenance of the entire infrastructure. This includes all the applications, servers, network devices, storage, and all managed services. Generally, devops service providers use Infrastructure-as-a-code practise to simplify configuration management on new environments to reduce any risk. For eg. using Terraform to rapidly build nodes in a cloud environment. This will give us the ability to destroy and rebuild the environment consistently each time. Doing so gives the user the ability to version control their infrastructure, and can be more agile when recovering from infrastructure outages.
Communication - DevOps focuses on communication. Communication between the development team and the operations team. DevOps promotes transparent and engaging communication between team members to avoid failures.
Test Automation - Devops services leverage automated testing to minimize time, increase testing frequency, run more tests and save time spent in manual testing. Automation is key. It is used to reduce the burden of running repetitive tests manually, and to execute difficult tests. There are many testing tools used by devops service providers like Appium, Selenium, XCUITest, RobotFramework, and JUnit, etc for test automation.
Continuous Monitoring - Monitoring the system and the infrastructure are very important. Continuous monitoring helps with just that. We use alerts, dashboards, and many tools to get real-time info on metrics like success and failure rates, error logs, system performance, deployment status, and the number of tests. Some of the popular tools used by devops specialists for continuous monitoring are Splunk, Nagios, Prometheus, NewRelic, Grafana, and Logstash, etc. To know more, visit: https://www.systango.com/services/devops