By Anand JK Jain, Vice President – Solutions Engineering, MSys Technologies
DevOps can transform software development by enabling collaboration, automation, and integration across teams and participating stakeholders.
As a constrained form of development and operations, DevOps in the software industry is steadily rising in its strategic significance. IT firms employing the best DevOps practices are leaders in their segments as they successfully create, communicate, and deliver superior value to their clients. DevOps takes the collaborative route, and enhancing coordination, integration, and communication among teams can significantly accelerate the software development life cycle (SDLC). The philosophy also empowers developers by sharing responsibilities, aligning goals, and integrating automation for achieving fast, accurate, and reliable results on the development front.
7 Best DevOps Practices in 2024
- Containerisation and Oochestration (Kubernetes and Docker): Containerisation and orchestration transform system development and operations by enhancing consistency, scalability, and automation. Docker, a platform that allows developers to package applications with all their dependencies into portable containers, ensures consistent behaviour across different environments. Kubernetes, an open-source orchestration system for automating container deployment, scaling, and management, efficiently handles varying loads and optimises resource utilisation. By integrating these technologies with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices, organisations reduce manual errors, speed up release cycles, and foster better collaboration between development and operations teams. This synergy enhances the DevOps process, supporting the building, deployment, and management of systems with greater efficiency and reliability.
- Full-stack observability: Full-stack observability provides comprehensive insights into every application stack layer, from infrastructure to user experience. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) enable teams to monitor, visualise, and analyse metrics and logs in real-time. This holistic view allows for rapid issue detection and resolution, ensuring optimal application performance and reliability. DevOps teams can proactively identify bottlenecks, anticipate problems, and make data-based decisions to improve system performance. Consequently, organisations can maintain high service availability, improve user satisfaction, and accelerate the software delivery process.
- DevSecOps: DevSecOps means integrating security practices into the entire DevOps pipeline—planning, development, building, testing, deployment, and operations—through continuous collaboration, automation, and compliance enforcement. These security practices include threat modelling, secure coding, automated security testing, continuous monitoring, regular security assessments, etc. This proactive approach enhances applications’ security posture, accelerates release cycles, and improves compliance with industry standards and regulations. As a result, organisations can achieve faster, more reliable, and more secure software delivery, maintaining a competitive edge in the market.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): A transformative approach, IaC allows coders to treat infrastructure resources like they treat code in the development process. This means coders can test, review, and deploy infrastructure as code files, saving resources and simplifying distribution across development teams. These IaC capabilities combine to offer better management of infrastructure resources, which is crucial for developers to stay ahead of the innovation curve. The benefits of IaC adoption also include achieving higher consistency in infrastructure configuration and deploying environments for successful code testing. IaC is also crucial in efficiently scaling applications and easily managing complex development, testing, and deployment environments.
- CI/CD: Continuous Integration (CI) allows developers to frequently merge code changes into a central repository, where automated builds and tests are run. This practice helps in the early detection of bugs and ensures that the codebase is always in a deployable state. Continuous Delivery (CD) extends this by automating the deployment process, ensuring that code changes are automatically prepared for a production release. This enables DevOps teams to deliver high-quality software more rapidly and consistently, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
- AIOps: AIOps leverages analytics, big data, and machine learning to enhance IT operations. At its core, AIOps involves ingesting data from multiple sources, such as logs, metrics, and events. This data is then analysed using machine learning algorithms to detect patterns and anomalies and predict potential issues before they occur. By automating routine tasks and incident responses, AIOps significantly improves operational efficiency, allowing the DevOps team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- DevEdgeOps: Edge computing places computational resources closer to the data source. This shift introduces unique challenges such as scale, connectivity, security, and device diversity, which traditional DevOps practices cannot fully address. DevEdgeOps bridges this gap by combining DevOps’ agility and automation with the specific needs of edge environments. It provides centralised edge management with real-time monitoring and remote troubleshooting, integrates edge infrastructure, and offers edge-compatible development tools. It supports CI/CD pipelines tailored for edge computing and simulates low bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, and device failures for proactive issue resolution.
Conclusion
DevOps has transformative potential, and by adopting the approaches discussed above, developers can excel in the software development process while delivering superior value to their clients. DevOps ensures better collaboration and coordination between developers. By enabling automation in various testing cycles, the approach helps IT firms stay competitive, agile, and flexible throughout the development process. DevOps also fosters a great work culture, allowing collaborators to exchange and distribute resources seamlessly. In sum, DevOps is a transformative approach that can change the very face of the development cycle by creating a win-win situation for all stakeholders in the IT industry and allied ecosystems.
