5 Best Practices for DevOps Transformation

The constant changes happening in the industry can be challenging to keep up with. To address it using DevOps could mean a colossal shift to the cloud, a cultural transformation, changes in roles and responsibilities of the individuals and teams, automation of processes, and so on. All these changes coming together can be overwhelming for any organization. Especially, when customers are sensitive to any glitches or performance issues and you need to perform business-as-usual.

Achieving DevOps is not straightforward and can take a long time before you get it working to deliver the desired results. But there are certain best practices for DevOps that can be generally applied to every organization seeking a digital transformation. Here are a few of them:

Crush the #1 Bottleneck: Poor Collaboration

No matter what technical prerequisites you achieve, collaboration often remains the most difficult barrier to cross. This is mostly due to the fact that the development, testers, and operations are viewed as separate departments, working towards their individual goals, rather than the common goal of faster delivery. So, better communication is one way to connect the siloed teams together. These are a few steps that you can take:

• Repeated education of all stakeholders on the shared responsibility to deliver a software.
• Develop policies against buck-passing that prolongs the delivery goals.
• Restructure teams for having smaller groups—containing developers, testers, operations, and others—that work on specific requirements.
• Using faster and more integrated communication tools like chat instead of emails.

Aim for Continuous Feedback

Software always needs to be user-centric but how do you make sure that you deploy the right software in time? Continuous feedback is fundamental for user-centric software deployment. Without continuous feedback, any investments in CI/CD, automation, and continuous testing may not bring business results. This is why it is essential to create feedback loops that connect and enhance development efforts with inputs from users, markets, QA, and operations. Following are a few methods you can consider for continuous feedback:

• Combine the insights from Big data analytics to feed development.
• Analyze DevOps metrics from application monitoring that impact user experience.
• Integrate insights from business stakeholders to know priorities and strengthen business value.

Improve IT governance

It is easy to create an environment and deploy code but it is equally easy to make it insecure and lose security. An enterprise-focused risk and compliance rules do not fit DevOps; especially, with the cloud. A layer of governance is imperative to have. Particularly, visibility on access and knowledge of where the VMs are running. Once you have clear visibility over risk and vulnerability, the next logical step should be to increase the compliance to industry standards. To improve governance here are a few tips:

• Leverage automation to place compliance and get insights on usage.
• Transparency in CI/CD processes with visibility over logs, audits, and approvals.
• Monitoring changes in privileges and associated risks.

Automate with the right tools

DevOps would require you to integrate many different parts of the development process and make them work seamlessly for faster delivery. This is why automation should be at the heart of the development process. But choosing the right tools can be difficult. Here are a few tips to select the right automation tool:

• Choose tools that increase collaboration and communication.
• Tools that offer integration with APIs should be preferred.
• Favor tools that capture logs for both manual and automated processes.
• Look for customization or develop own small tools that increase performance.

Monitor DevOps performance

The end goal of DevOps is to deliver faster to production. It can be improved by monitoring the DevOps performance indicators like deployment time, Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and failure rate. Such metrics can be constantly monitored to figure out which areas need to be optimized in order to speed up delivery. This practice cannot be missed if you want your DevOps to be successful. So, here are a few things you need to remember for increasing DevOps performance:

• Make sure issues that arise are resolved in a way that they don’t reappear.
• Automate tracking of metrics wherever possible.
• Keep historical trends and analyze how to improve.

What to Do with These Best Practices for DevOps

There are no set guidelines that you can use straight away. Due to many factors like application features, tech stack, and team capabilities, DevOps at your organization will be different from others’ experiences. To have a successful transformation is to understand your own organization and experiment with several practices to know what works best for you. If you’re having a difficult time on your own, reaching out to a DevOps solutions provider can ensure you unlock these best practices and more.

Are you ready to integrate best practices for DevOps into your own organization? We can help! Evolutyz is experienced at creating a framework that leads to greater quality and faster time to market. Connect with us and we’ll show you how.