DevOps is a popular software methodology that offers multiple advantages for organizations. As a result, many companies want to know more about how to make it work for them.
The answer is built on DevOps principles that you can incorporate into your workflows. Of course, using tools designed with DevOps in mind will simplify the process.
DevOps combines software development and IT operations into a single, functional whole. It’s a broadly encompassing culture and set of practices that aim to accelerate these processes and make them more adaptable. When combined with a focus on security at each stage, the practice can also be termed “DevSecOps.” Automation is commonly employed throughout the DevOps lifecycle.
The many benefits of using DevOps include greater efficiency, quality, and speed. Businesses are switching over in droves to make software that meets users’ expectations for reliability and regular new features.
Once you’re aware of these advantages, it’s useful to work through a checklist—thus ensuring you’ll maximize the value of DevOps for your organization.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps is a modern paradigm developed to fulfill the demands that the current market places on organizations. It’s all about doing more with less—an idea that resonates with most teams! With DevOps, you deliver more frequent releases, and each release has more stability than it would in a traditional paradigm.
Thanks to the speed and stability of DevOps, you can more easily meet people’s needs for innovative features. In addition, instead of having to wait weeks (or months) for a new release, users can enjoy features as soon as you develop them.
Automation sits at the heart of the efficiency gains in DevOps. Any aspect—testing or deployment, for instance—can be automated. The upshot is fewer errors and a streamlined output. Furthermore, as it becomes less complicated to release software, you’re able to release more often.
Another advantage of automating these tasks is to free up developers, who can instead work on more creative activities. You could even let these employees focus on automating further tasks, thus ensuring that these benefits continue to increase.
Frequent releases are smaller and more manageable. This drives agility, allowing you to pivot to new features and bug-fixing with ease. In this sense, DevOps is not like the large, fragile releases seen in earlier approaches.
Moreover, these rapid releases put software in the hands of users, where developers can monitor just how well their code works. After all, there’s no substitute for evidence in determining what works best and how to further improve your software.
DevOps has gone mainstream, now adopted at the team level or across all of IT for most enterprise organizations that deploy software to production. The trens, which is based on collaboration between developers and IT Operations teams, has come a long way since it emerged more than a decade ago. Performance enhancements drive the creation of more useful software. Further, people can engage with the software and see the results of your user-centric efforts right away.
Checklist for Implementing and Maintaining DevOps Practices
Here are some of the core principles you should know about when planning to implement and maintain DevOps as a practice. These are general methods that you can apply in various ways to fit your organization’s particular needs. Together, they constitute the approach of continuous development and delivery.
Automate as Much as Possible
DevOps is based on automation. The goal is to reduce manual processes that are slow and prone to error. For example, you can automate test and deployment processes with FlexDeploy to accelerate releases.
Read our report, State of DevOps: Best Practice Adoption to find out.
Improve Continuously
Instead of thinking of DevOps as a one-time deal, think of it as an ongoing challenge to perform better. Start with the low-hanging fruit, then gradually apply automation and other practices to additional areas.
Shift Left
The phrase “shift left” implies moving tests to an earlier phase in the software development lifecycle. Rather than only testing after feature development—as in conventional approaches—you shift testing to incorporate the initial stages as well. This is a great way to identify glitches before they make it into production, and it’ll cost a lot less to fix bugs at these early stages.
Use Configuration Management, Version Everything
Control your hardware and software so your team can work without worrying about infrastructure failures. Essentially, you want to track all environments—for instance, testing, development, and production environments—to verify that they work consistently. An automated configuration platform should assist in managing your resources.
Frequent Small Releases
Make many small releases rather than a few large ones. Occasional large releases subject you to unforeseen risks, and the impact is greater. Frequent small releases give you advance notice of issues, and any potential impact is more manageable.
Incorporate Feedback From Users and Systems
With DevOps, there are numerous opportunities to collect information from the people who use your software. Here, frequent releases provide you with a chance to learn how users respond to each incremental change. You can also take information from monitoring and deployment tools to understand how your code performs.
Collaboration and Responsibility
Foster collaboration between development and operations teams—and throughout the organization. DevOps brings together the strengths of different groups to build something bigger and more effective. To enable this synergy, each team must take responsibility for the entire project.
Apply DevOps With FlexDeploy
DevOps is a powerful way to produce software. That said, it requires some degree of knowledge of the practice. This DevOps checklist compiles important information for developers to consider when bringing DevOps to a company. Through automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement from many small releases, you can increase the speed and quality of your work.
Flexagon is an authority on DevOps practices and a leader in continuous delivery and release automation software. Organizations around the globe depend on Flexagon’s unique FlexDeploy platform, which helps you put key principles into practice—even with complex systems such as Oracle EBS and Salesforce.
From testing to deployment, each stage is simple, fast, and precise. In addition, Flexagon can assist you with cloud migration. Request a demo to see how FlexDeploy can optimize your DevOps goals.
