In today’s fast-paced tech world, companies that fail to adopt effective DevOps practices risk falling behind their competitors and missing out on critical business opportunities. Robust continuous integration and deployment solutions are essential for business continuity and growth. Here are some essential rules to embrace DevOps effectively and stay ahead in the competitive market.
Embracing Agile Project Management
Why do some companies release new features every few weeks, while others take years? The reason is agile project management. Agile project management is an iterative approach that helps software teams enhance their development speed, increase collaboration, and respond well to current market trends.
Tools like Jira Software can help your teams segregate the work into smaller, more manageable tasks for faster deployment. By integrating with Bitbucket or GitHub, your application is already well-documented, with each pull request corresponding to a business object (Story, Task). Encourage teams to add the Jira ticket to the pull request for better tracking and collaboration.
Code Review
One crucial practice is ensuring that at least two people look at the code before it ships. As a developer, you create a pull request, and another developer reviews the code and makes comments. This step is vital in high-security environments and helps to spread knowledge, allowing each developer to grow and learn from each other. No single person owns that part; the knowledge is on the team.
Implement security practices in the application development
Security is a shared responsibility. There is not much a security team can do if your application puts vulnerable code out there (this is called a Zero-day vulnerability). DevSecOps can put tools and processes in place to try to detect vulnerabilities early in your code pipeline. You can use Bitbucket and AWS CodePipeline to provide a single dashboard integrated with your code repository and deployment tools. These tools give complete visibility of all the changes, pull requests, deployment warnings, and test coverage.
Implementing Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
In continuous integration or CI, developers commit new codes to a shared repository several times. Continuous Delivery or CD automates the software delivery process.
You can use many tools to build this. The critical focus should be on incorporating all necessary testing, such as code review, unit testing, security scans, and so on, to ensure all rules are followed.
Observability
There are many complexities of cloud and microservice architecture. Therefore, implementing observability is a must-have DevOps best practice.
OpenSearch, NewRelic, Splunk, Datadog, and Sentry are examples of many tools that can help you monitor and manage your systems effectively. Choose the right tools for your specific workload to ensure optimal performance and issue resolution.
Releases and deployments with feature flags and canary releases
Deployment is the process of sending the software to its final destination – your clients. You will disrupt everything if you do not have the proper deployment process, especially in SaaS companies.
Feature flags
The feature flags are very useful, especially in mobile applications that deploy the software with the new feature turned off. This method enables you to deploy the same code versions in different environments. Implement feature flags as conditional statements within the source code that require external validation to turn features on or off. Some tools also allow you to enable features for a small percentage of users, for example, 10% of the user base, scaling up if everything is stable.
Canary deployments
Canary releases are a DevOps practice that tests the impact of a new feature release on a small user segment before a full rollout. This approach helps you gauge the changes made to the code without affecting the entire user base. If successful, you can scale up the deployment; if not, you can roll back the changes.
Canary deployments can be managed using load balancers, AWS, Kubernetes, and other tools.
Conclusion
Adopting DevOps best practices is essential for companies to remain competitive in today’s tech market. Companies that have not yet implemented DevOps risk falling behind, facing challenges such as longer delivery times, failures, and poor team collaboration.
Evolving your DevOps maturity level enhances development speed and security from the start, and promotes continuous and reliable delivery. Practices such as agile project management, code review, CI/CD, observability, feature flags, and canary deployments are crucial for success.
If you want to implement DevOps best practices or evolve your maturity level, schedule an assessment with the specialists from e-Core.
