DEVOPSdigest

For any business enterprise or organization, achieving success involves taking a multi-pronged approach. Adopting digital technologies is accepted as a surefire way of staying ahead of the curve and achieving outcomes such as better productivity and efficiency, streamlined processes, reduced costs, strict compliance with standards, and higher revenues, among others.

A cogent DevOps transformation strategy allows businesses to achieve the above outcomes in short and quick development cycles. It enhances collaboration between teams and calls for a cultural change in the organization. For instance, accepting a new process to run across teams that seeks to eliminate silos and enhance efficiency without any fuss or resistance is a good start. No wonder businesses cutting across domains are looking to embrace a DevOps transformation roadmap. This will give a fillip to the DevOps market, which is expected to touch $57.90 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 24.2% (Source: alliedmarketresearch).

However, DevOps implementation is not as seamless and easy as it may appear. The presence of multiple teams and processes, each with different performance yardsticks and objectives, can spoil the broth. Since the DevOps transformation entails both development and operations teams collaborating to change their deeply entrenched culture, the journey calls for pursuing DevOps best practices as discussed below.

Businesses developing software products need to plan and implement an effective DevOps transformation strategy to achieve a host of objectives. These include reduced time to market, faster query resolution, shorter development cycles, streamlined processes, and increased deployment speed, among others.

The 5 best practices to achieve the same are:

1. Create a collaborative culture

The entire premise of DevOps is based on achieving seamless collaboration among teams. To foster collaboration, there has to be a positive cultural change in the organization based on cross-team communication. Since the focus is on eliminating silos between departments and business units, there is likely to be resistance and no overnight solution.

Given that the DevOps team is likely to encounter differences, it is crucial to modify workflows, team structures, and habits. With clear communication, transparency and trust can be instilled among team members so that they can take pride in shared ownership and responsibility. The shift from a traditional waterfall model to DevOps can mean faster software development and deployment and quicker bug fixing.

2. Monitoring CI/CD pipelines

Appropriate tools can be used to monitor the CI/CD pipelines on a continuous basis. This helps in detecting bugs or vulnerabilities and fixing them quickly. Since most monitoring tools can function seamlessly across cloud or on-premise infrastructure, any DevOps transformation plan can be executed quickly and effectively on the ground.

3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

When it comes to automating the provisioning and management of digital infrastructure, the service of Infrastructure as a Code, or IaC, is leveraged. It has the capability of recreating the digital infrastructure every time it is applied. Automation helps to eliminate the need for manually provisioning servers, storage, database connections, operating systems, and other elements.

Used in conjunction with CD, IaC creates infrastructure using versioning that the DevOps teams use. It allows teams to test the software code in a production-like environment in the early phases of the SDLC.

4. Security-first approach (DevSecOps)

Security as a paradigm has become the key focus area for business enterprises given the rising threats of cybercrime. Any neglect can cause massive financial losses and damage to equity. Since any CI/CD system needs credentials for deployment in different operating environments, it can be targeted by hackers to breach data.

To get around the problem, security should be baked right into the CI/CD pipelines a la DevSecOps. This can help DevOps transformation services detect security-related vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, thereby improving the digital offerings quickly and consistently.

5. Test automation

As continuous testing is a feature of DevOps, it is important to implement DevOps automationwherein testing is done early and quite often in the SDLC. The aim is to catch and fix bugs as early as possible to reduce rework. Test automation may include several tests, such as unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, performance tests, and end-to-end tests. It frees testers from doing mundane, monotonous tasks and lets them focus on creating innovative test cases to prevent errors. The process of test automation includes prioritizing test cases, determining test case scenarios, choosing the right automation tools, setting environments, and evaluating outcomes.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned best practices can help businesses to realize the full potential of enterprise DevOps transformation. However, this is not going to happen overnight but by leveraging the right skills and experience of the DevOps team.