Top 8 DevOps Best Practices for 2024

Implement best Practices for DevOps to automate tasks and redefine software development 

Do you need to implement a fast and efficient development process to deploy products and services to run a successful business? Ensure easy maintenance of existing deployments with DevOps. This is precisely why businesses need Cloud DevOps best practices. It helps them to reduce complexity, frustration, and inefficiency in teams.

In a Stackoverflow developer survey, around 80% of respondents believed that DevOps is critical for your business. You need to hire DevOps engineers who help from execution to delivery and support software development.

What is DevOps & how it works? What issues can you address with DevOps?

DevOps solves some of the most critical issues: speeding up time to market, enhancing software quality, cutting cycle times through automation, and raising customer happiness. It also improves communication, automation, and measurement. Companies that were successful at DevOps excelled in implementing DevOps methodology.

What is DevOps Methodology?

DevOps methodology is the way of working that brings software developers together with IT operation engineers who ensure smooth running. It ensures software development, testing, and deployment. 

DevOps Best Practices you might want to adopt in your business

1. Embracing Agile Project Management

You may wonder how do Agile and DevOps interrelate with each other. You might be surprised to learn that agile and DevOps can work together.

Scrum can make a difference in specific teams between a never-ending struggle and fruitful, gratifying teamwork. An agile team will use the fundamentals of the scrum, then examine their practices, and adjust to being more efficient when the demands of the business or the task itself require something new.

By integrating Agile and DevOps management with DevOps pipeline best practices, you will discover how it may enhance your development process and produce dependable, scalable, and maintainable products.

2. Use Testing Automation

Developers need to automate their testing processes with DevOps professionals. Test automation can advance your DevOps projects, help you save time, and increase the capacity of your pipeline for continuous testing. DevOps can leverage test automation in various ways, including using test cases to find issues in your code.

With the help of this automated testing process, you can launch your product much more quickly. In the course of continuous testing, automatic quality checks can also essentially eliminate the possibility of human error.

Test automation can simplify the repetitious nature of some DevOps testing to streamline and accelerate the process. Throughout your testing procedure, you can ensure reliability with automation. So, optimize your strategy with test automation for a successful DevOps implementation.

3. Build Security with DevSecOps

DevSecOps helps to improve an organization's capacity to deliver apps and services at high velocity while maintaining security. It’s a set of practices, cultural approaches, and tools that bring together software development (Dev), IT operations (Ops), and security (Sec). It begins with secure development lifecycles and predetermined security patterns for developed services and applications and ends with automated security for automated operations.

Example - Allianz

International insurance company Allianz had some security and DevOps issues. The company started to change its internal security ethos by including all stakeholders. It trained security professionals and equipped engineers with security expertise and automated tools to find bugs in the code on their own.

4. Include Microservice Architecture

A shared set of DevOps ideas developed at organizations like Amazon, Netflix, SoundCloud, Facebook, Google, and many more gave rise to microservice architecture. Those businesses often began with monolithic programs, which quickly transformed into deconstructed services. These services subsequently interacted via RESTful APIs and other network-based messaging protocols to become the forerunners of a microservices-based architecture.

Microservices in DevOps move development to a flexible architecture while streamlining the DevOps process and improving productivity and application quality. This results in creating cloud-native applications that can meet any user demand.

Example - The service scenario for airlines contains examples of microservice designs. Suppose we focus on the part of the process that involves booking flights. In that case, we can see that it’s divided into the following main tasks: inventory adjustment, seat allocation, fare calculation, timetable lookup, reward management, and customer update.

5. Work on Containerization

Developers can create a portable package that contains the code, runtime engine, tools, libraries, and settings of an application by containerizing it. As a result, the program runs more efficiently and is considerably simpler to install in new contexts.

Containerization assures that a program created in one environment will function in another by packaging the application and its environmental requirements. This facilitates the collaborative work developers, and testers do on the application—precisely what the DevOps culture is about.

Example – Netflix created Titus, a container management platform, due to difficulties during the first transition of some of its services to containers. Netflix uses 200,000 clusters and half a million containers daily to run video streaming, content-encoding, recommendations, machine learning (ML), studio technology, big data, and internal engineering tools.

6. Take Advantage of Kubernetes

How Kubernetes benefit DevOps is the big question. It helps engineers to communicate their dependencies to IT operations. Workload reduction is one of the main benefits of adopting Kubernetes for DevOps. Additionally, it resolves inconsistencies across several environments. It enables engineers to meet client demands while relying on the cloud for many operational apps.

Kubernetes makes container tasks easier. It simplifies tasks like horizontal auto-scaling, rolling upgrades, and canary deployment. It is crucial in optimizing the DevOps Managed Services' pipelines for development, testing, and deployment.

Examples - Pinterest uses Kubernetes to design failsafe strategies and quickly deploy projects. The group can reclaim more than 80% of capacity at off-peak times with Kubernetes.

7. Improve Efficiency with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery

The purpose of a CI/CD pipeline is to lessen the risks associated with putting the program into production. However, what it means in DevOps is that its effectiveness hinges on how efficiently the development department uses automation as it has the technologies at its disposal as productivity depends on DevOps automation.

Supporting the development of a release pipeline, which is the path a piece of code or feature must go from a developer's local computer into production, is one of the primary duties of DevOps managers.

Example - When Amazon switched to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, DevOps architects could scale capacity, lower server capacity costs, and change to a continuous deployment procedure. Any developer can use it to deploy their code whenever they want to the servers they require.

8. Encourage Serverless Adoption of Cloud

There are few opportunities to separate development from operations when assessing any serverless service. This requires a cloud-based operational environment. And DevOps fills the void here. It encourages the integration of operations and development, supported by serverless deployments.

There is now barely any distinction between engineers and cloud operational developers with a serverless architecture. Their overlapping functions comprise the essential elements of DevOps. This results in simplified operating and development processes.

You can use Azure serverless, which provides Azure API Management to secure, publish, transform, maintain, and monitor APIs by taking the help of a cloud DevOps engineer. You can also use DevOps AWS tools to automate manual tasks, keep engineers in control of DevOps. With Azure DevOps best practices you can help teams manage complex environments.

Example - To serve each request, Codepen uses serverless architecture. The increased security that Codepen offers users due to the serverless switch. AWS has dramatically enhanced the monitoring of Codepen activity. With a skilled DevOps engineer, Codepen handles up to 200k requests per hour, resulting in lower expenses and more straightforward procedures.

Here’s a case study – Our DevOps engineers helped a client to migrate to store, segregate and analyze their data and streamline their daily workflows along with best DevOps practices.

Need to Implement DevOps Best Practices?

Want to make optimum use of DevOps benefits for your business? As a Software and web development firm, Clarion Technologies has been in business for almost 20 years. We provide DevOps consulting services to our clients, including development, plugin, automation, DevOps practices, and API development. We understand what is DevOps and offer support for redefining software delivery & deployment for an effective DevOps strategy. Reach out to us at info@clariontech.com or contact us for more information. Get acquainted with us by working on your project in DevOps stratgies with a two-week risk-free trial!