20+ Proven DevOps Best Practices to Gain a Competitive Edge

Software projects are successful when they are managed well. A well-managed project is defined by effective collaboration between teams, a sense of shared responsibility and better resource use. This directly increases the productivity of software development, impacting business success. The DevOps approach supports this need for faster and more productive application development while ensuring quality and reliability. 

DevOps best practices align everyone in an enterprise involved in software design, development, testing and deployment to a singular goal of releasing high-quality software. The cost of poor software quality grew to $2.41 trillion in 2022 and is expected to rise further in 2024. Also, the DevOps methodology was identified as a top software development method practiced worldwide in 2022, which boosts both the speed and quality of software development, is thus a valuable way to benefit from enhanced software quality and prevent the accumulation of technical debt.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps stands for Development and Operations. It comprises approaches, technologies and practices that aim to remove the hurdles between isolated development and operations teams in an organisation. When both these teams collaborate following DevOps, it leads to faster development and deployment of software and solutions. 

DevOps best practices enhance the pace of software development services and deployment approaches. This is because it becomes the shared responsibility of both the development and IT operations teams. 

Faster software delivery does not mean a sacrifice in quality. DevOps prioritises Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, which means that testing is done throughout the design and development process. 

Continuous testing and feedback remove inefficiencies in code. It leads to the deployment of highly reliable applications. Consequently, enterprises can deliver value to their customers faster and maintain their competitiveness. 

The Significance of DevOps

Firms need to release performant and sustainable solutions to stay relevant in a volatile market. The DevOps approach facilitates the delivery of new features in a shorter timeframe. It benefits the end users of the product and prevents them from veering to other competitors. 

At the organisational level, DevOps best practices and tools foster greater collaboration between teams and streamline their processes. The approach fully eliminates the issues associated with building and integrating code unsystematically, leading to seamless and high-quality software delivery. 

Here are the major benefits of using the DevOps philosophy.

• The DevOps model allows organisations to stay current by releasing products aligned with evolving trends.
• Resource allocation and management are better when following the DevOps approach, which causes less confusion and delay.
• The CI/CD practices ensure that every change or iteration is functional and safe, reducing the risk of issues with the deployed application.
• The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach under DevOps eliminates manual setup, minimises inconsistencies and increases the pace of environment provisioning. 
• Continuous monitoring of applications allows development and operations teams to catch errors in real time and fix them promptly. 
• Studies confirm that efficient DevOps teams deploy code 46 times more frequently and are also less likely to fail when iterating the product. 
• The use of CAMS (Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing) systems enhances software quality, which, in turn, boosts customer satisfaction.
• The usage of automated compliance procedures and granular controls facilitates the quick deployment of highly compliant and secure applications. 

Also Read : Top Enterprise Mobility Security Challenges

Best DevOps Practices for Successful Software Delivery

Adoption of DevOps comes with certain challenges, especially for medium-scale enterprises. However, following the DevOps best practices explained below can help you prevent the hurdles and implement the model successfully.

Get Leadership on Board

If an organisation’s senior management and leadership do not fully support the DevOps model, its practices cannot be adopted. To gain the buy-in of C-suite staff, demonstrate the incentives of adopting the new software development methodology. You must show them the substantial productivity gains that implementing DevOps best practices brings. 

A great way to do this is to enlighten them about the link between agile practices and innovation. Similarly, show case studies of firms that have successfully adopted DevOps. Real-life examples also help in getting a blueprint for implementing DevOps. 

Leadership should also note that DevOps best practices are not the same for every organisation. The culture flourishes slowly, and their task is to ensure that every team has the needed resources to operate collaboratively. Having dedicated DevOps team to work with your software engineers is a good way to start experimenting with this approach and experience its benefits first-hand.

Build a DevOps Collaboration Culture

DevOps collaboration culture emphasises collaboration between DevOps engineers and software engineers. When the two groups work together, it accelerates the development and project timelines. Without a DevOps collaboration culture, it is not possible to achieve goals like IaC, continuous integration and delivery, monitoring, governance and performance enhancements.

So, to promote such a culture, your company’s DevOps and software engineers should make the following modifications to your current development process: 

• Do not employ role-based access controls too restrictively, as it hinders collaboration between team members.
• Overcome the Software Development Challenges that prevent effective communication between DevOps and software engineering teams.
• Improve collaboration by using infrastructure management platforms that provide an in-depth overview of every area of your IT infrastructure.
• Maintain clear documentation, including project plans and guidelines, to align professionals in both teams.
• Implement security vulnerability scanning in the software development process so both DevOps and software engineering teams can notice issues in real time. 
• Enforce governance mechanisms so DevOps engineers do not need to worry about critical issues arising from code due to code changes. 
• Define metrics and KPIs that will allow both teams to assess the success of their efforts. 

Start with Incremental Updates

A basic DevOps practice is using an iterative methodology. It means performing frequent but small updates to innovate at a quicker pace. The incremental updates make deployment less risky and enable development and operations teams to address bugs easily. 

Incremental updates make it easy to detect the recent deployment that resulted in the error. Organisations that use this DevOps practice increase their failure-recovery rate and encounter minimal issues with the launch of new functionalities.

Integrate DevOps with Agile Approach

DevOps descends from agile development practices that emphasise executing tasks in iterative sprints. So, combining the two is one of the best ways to produce quality software faster. It streamlines the release process, prompts collaboration and lowers bugs, leading to high user satisfaction. 

Here are some points to consider when integrating Agile and DevOps teams:

• Every stakeholder, such as product owner, scrum master, system administrator and operations manager, needs to actively contribute to every process, from development to delivery and maintenance. 
• Use the Kanban approach for continual delivery without overburdening only the development team.
• Frequently test the Agile framework for its functionality and the DevOps approach for performance and load testing of the solution. 
• Use the Extreme Programming (XP) method to generate releases in short development cycles and adjust new customer requirements.
• Understand the progress of the workflow with metrics, which include the following: 
  • Time taken from software production to launch
  • Percentage of launch date adherences
  • Percentage increase in the number of product or update releases
  • Defects or support requirements

Employ Automation Through CI/CD

DevOps CI/CD Development is a crucial component of DevOps automation. Continuous integration CI facilitates testing every change and checking whether those changes breach something in the environment. Through continuous deployment, DevOps teams deploy the changes that have been tested into production. 

The automated builds and tests in CI/CD pipelines lower the time to launch new and high-quality updates. Here are some essential DevOps best practices to follow when implementing CI/CD for automation. 

• Commit code changes as frequently as possible.
• Eliminate the stages in your CI/CD pipelines where inefficiencies occur using monitoring tools.
• Use the same code artifacts across all environments to minimise inconsistencies. 
• Use IaC tools to automate the structuring of the testing environments. 
• Add automated security tests throughout your pipelines. 

Use Continuous Testing Throughout SDLC

Continuous testing is one of the best DevOps practices for assessing and improving software quality. It is based significantly on automation and is integral to any DevOps workflow. In order to employ this DevOps practice, the teams should have clear testing objectives. Accordingly, tools that align with different stages of testing should be chosen.

Next, incorporate test automation in the CI/CD pipeline and review their comprehensive run reports. Configuring feedback loops to keep the teams informed about failures is also essential. The DevOps teams should have the following categories of tools to use for continuous testing:

• Version Control Systems (VCS) to manage source code
• CI tools to build the code and test it
• Test management tools that you can incorporate with CI/CD tools
• Application performance monitoring tools

Use IaC for Continuous Delivery

Infrastructure as Code Development is one of the major DevOps best practices for delivering dependable applications at scale. It resolves the issue of ‘environment drift’ in pipelines, which causes deployment issues. With IaC, teams need to create deployment environments individually, and over time, they become ‘snowflakes,’ i.e., a distinct configuration that cannot be automatically reproduced.

IaC enforces consistency by indicating the desired environment states through documented code. When the same environment is generated every time IaC is employed, runtime problems are prevented because of configuration drift. Also, IaC allows you to provision several test environments and be sure of their reliability. 

Under IaC, infrastructure setups are compiled in an editable code file. Teams can check it into source control, version the file, and review it with their software’s source code. The infrastructure code also integrates with CI/CD platforms. It fully automates your product deployments.

Set up Continuous Feedback for Continuous Improvement

DevOps culture cannot thrive without continuous feedback. It not only facilitates quick iterative enhancements but also strengthens teamwork. While CI/CD pipelines incorporate feedback, the significance of setting up continuous feedback loops is manifold. 

Continuous feedback loops enable issue detection at a lightning pace. Additionally, the software meets the highest quality standards and is according to the user’s expectations when it has been improved based on feedback. 

Organisations should implement feedback loops by first identifying the suitable feedback mechanisms at every step of the DevOps lifecycle. Automating the collection and distribution of feedback and using collaborative tools to facilitate feedback sharing are two other essential steps to employ this DevOps best practice successfully. 

Equally important to gain valuable feedback are monitored metrics. Through monitoring, you can gauge the success or failure of the final code of your CI/CD process. So, it is essential to invest in monitoring tools that generate alerts for variation in desired output and enable developers and QA testers to address the reasons.

Practice Configuration Management to Maintain Consistency

Configuration management is essential for a consistent and reliable DevOps environment. It is one of the DevOps best practices to prevent issues created by incorrect configurations that impact the software quality and performance. 

Configuration management is also known as configuration as a code. The practice involves defining all the configurations of the servers or resources as a code or script. It includes parameters that define the suitable settings for the product to run appropriately. They are then checked into version control.

The code checked into version control is executed as a part of the deployment pipeline to design the infrastructure and its configurations in an automated manner. 

DevOps teams should use configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef as they automate the management of configurations across servers. This enforces consistency and lowers human error. Another important practice is keeping configuration files in Git that provide version control. It enhances collaboration among members and offers a list of all the modifications.

Build Software Through the Microservices Approach

A microservices architecture breaks the software or an application into distinct services. The separate services can be developed and deployed independently. This approach isolates problems with a particular service and, consequently, their impact on the rest of the application. 

The microservices development solutions thus complements the DevOps model, which emphasizes continuous development, testing, and deployment. Smaller and independent teams work on individual microservices, which reduces development bottlenecks and contributes to speedier feature delivery. Microservices can also be made flexible if an organisation wants to employ security, duplication, and monitoring configurations specific to a single service. 

The best DevOps practices below should be used when implementing Microservices in DevOps.

• Ensure that every microservice aligns with a specific business objective and has a distinct functionality.
• Every microservice should have a clear API, which will allow different teams to understand how to interact with the service.
• Use CI/CD pipelines and IaC to automate deployment, testing, monitoring and provisioning of infrastructure.
• Both the development and operations teams should use a common toolset with common terminology and procedures for dependencies and requirements. 

Also Read : Effective Microservice Best Practices for Building Scalable Applications

Make DevOps Implementation Easier with Containers

The DevOps model is meant to deliver applications faster as different teams work together, not in silos. Containers are pivotal in enabling increased development speed. 

The DevOps Containerization Services enables developers to compile the code, runtimes and system tools needed to run an application in a single place. Containers are very lightweight, so developers can build and deploy applications on the servers with the operating system. 

As production code can be run on the local machine, developers do not need to match the configuration requirements. Also, there is no need to replicate the development environment as everything needed remains in the container box. This convenience promotes greater efficiency and performance.

The DevOps teams do not need to provision environments when using containers. The code can be tested by configuring environments on demand without any changes in the way the application operates. 

Create an Automated Incident Management Framework

One of the best DevOps practices is active response to failures, ensuring quick service restoration. This is especially important when using containers, which the DevOps teams generally use with microservices.

However, microservices have numerous moving parts, which introduce complexity regarding monitoring and visibility. To mitigate risks, an incident management framework is crucial. It means creating an incident response team, automating the detection and resolution of issues and using the lessons learned from each incident. 

A robust incident management platform also helps DevOps teams handle the huge number of alerts that are usually incurred with microservices. The DevOps Automation Solutions enables teams to track, prioritise and fix issues systematically. By using incident management platforms with automated incident response capabilities, the mean time to resolution (MTTR) is significantly reduced. 

Beside using the platforms for automated detection, DevOps teams should use tools that automate the incident response workflows. The tools guide the incident response process, ensuring everything from initial detection to resolution happens as per the organisation’s parameters.

Secure Your DevOps Pipeline

The need for security becomes manifold in DevOps, which emphasises speed. According to Gartner, static and software composition analysis are imperative for DevOps teams for application security testing.

Security measures should be a part of the entire application development lifecycle to identify and fix all major and minor issues. DevSecOps Development is one of the DevOps best practices that focuses on integrating security into the very structure of the DevOps pipeline. 

Some major ways to practice DevSecOps include the following:

• Shift left or make security tests and protocols a part of the software development lifecycle from the beginning.
• Secure the DevOps pipelines with tools for Static Application Security Testing, Dynamic Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). 
• Integrate security scans every time a code is updated or pushed ahead. 
• Manage configurations and enforce security policies through configuration management tools like Ansible, Terraform and Puppet.

Use DORA Metrics to Measure Performance

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) lists standard metrics for gaining insights into your performance following the best DevOps practices. By using the metrics, team members can continuously improve their processes. There are four critical DORA metrics that DevOps teams should use to assess their performance. 

• Deployment Frequency to predict productivity metrics and find anomalies across your SDLC.
• Lead Time for changes to know how quickly work is delivered to the end-user.
• Change Failure rate to know how frequently a change is leading to failure in production.
• Time to Restore Service to calculate the time taken to operate again from an incident.

When implementing DORA metrics, create your pipeline in a way that parses data sources in changes, incidents and code deployments. Create tables for changes, incidents, and codes, and analyse the data extracted from the pipeline accordingly. After that, measure the performance against the metrics.

Focus on Observability to Operate Efficiently

DevOps best practices emphasise managing, monitoring and deploying code free of errors. This happens when teams understand production systems and can manage the complexities in them. Competent DevOps teams use observability tools to comprehend the internal state of a system according to the outputs it shows.

It means collecting and assessing logs, metrics and traces of the applications to gain awareness about what is happening inside the system. Observability is different from monitoring because it does not give you information about the overall health of your product. Instead, observability is the property of the system that offers granular insights about things going on inside the system resulting in its current performance. 

It is essential to integrate observability into your Software Development Life Cycle by using the right tools and setting up a monitoring system for pre and post-deployment. Further, automate the entire testing process and utilise the data to enhance your operations.

Embrace Proactive Monitoring

You may have already gained an idea of the importance of monitoring in DevOps pipelines. But it is essential to know that monitoring should be done proactively to optimise resource usage and costs and minimise unforeseen risks. 

As one of the key DevOps best practices, proactive monitoring relies on configuring meaningful, timely and actionable alerts. Team members should gain real-time and complete visibility into the system performance through monitoring tools. It helps in comprehending the existing state of the infrastructure, applications and network and also promotes transparency. 

Some major categories of continuous and proactive monitoring tools include Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, infrastructure monitoring tools and network monitoring tools.

Add API Management in Your CI/CD Pipeline

Enterprises and DevOps teams use and create Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) almost every single day to connect an increasing number of services and applications. APIs facilitate the integration of varying tools and services and so are essential for automation and coordination, which is central to DevOps.

APIs automate tasks, such as building, testing, and deployment involved in software product development. Effective management of API is important for DevOps teams who use multiple APIs in their workflows. This can be done by following the DevOps Best practices below.

• Track the performance metrics of your APIs, such as response times, rate of errors and throughput.
• Use API security protocols to prevent them from unauthorised access.
• Use automated testing tools to continuously test the APIs.
• Keep the design of the API user-friendly, low-maintenance and scalable.

Elevate Testing with Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

 SLOs are quantifiable goals that define the norm of reliability and performance for any application. They offer an accurate measure of potential issues, which is crucial for DevOps and dedicated development team who want to balance innovativeness and reliability in their updates. By setting up SLOs for testing, DevOps teams ensure a high degree of quality in the testing process. 

SLOs can be set for test automation, test infrastructure, test data management and test quality. Incorporating them allows teams to find out areas for improvement and improve their testing efforts. In turn, the measurable target results in a high standard of software quality.

Set up a Release Management System

In DevOps, release management means coordinating, scheduling and deploying product releases to live environments. Through it, DevOps teams can ensure that new functionalities, bug fixes and upgrades reach the end users reliably and promptly. A properly-defined release management system focuses on teamwork and transparency throughout software development and leads to quicker feedback.

Here are the three different stages in a DevOps release management system. 

• The development team builds code or updates.
• The code is tested in a staging environment, which is made almost similar to the production environment.
• After comprehensive testing based on defined criteria, that code goes into the production environment.

Adopt Cloud-Based Solutions and Technologies

Implementing the best DevOps practices becomes easier when you have access to the tools, framework and infrastructure hosted on the cloud. Cloud services & solutions, which are scalable and on-demand, enable most of the practices of collaboration, microservice development, and automated configuration management mentioned above. Moreover, the tools that facilitate coding, building, testing, deployment and monitoring exist in a centralised architecture when hosted on the cloud. 

Also Read : Multi-Cloud Architecture Designs for an Effective Cloud Strategy

Thus, the tools can be accessed by teams anytime, anywhere. Also, you can upscale or downscale cloud-native tools, which minimises the cost of ownership. Payment is only for a particular dev cycle. There is no cost involved for future projects, making it feasible for DevOps teams in smaller organisations.

Learn from Incidents

DevOps teams flourish when members turn incidents into lessons. An attitude to continuously learn from mistakes and view them as opportunities for progress leads to constant improvement. It enhances systems, workflows and products. 

Identifying the root causes of instances gives insights to boost the efficiency of systems your teams design. Successful DevOps teams often run a post-incident review. The discussion is not about blaming, naming or finger pointing faults. Instead, its a retrospective session to talk freely about the issue and work toward making processes better.

Harikrishna Kundariya

CEO, eSparkBiz

Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, chatbot and blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz @Software Development Company where you can Hire Software Developers. His 14+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on Web app development.