DevOps has progressed from a trendy buzzword to an industry standard thanks to the capable ways it streamlines tech operations. More importantly, DevOps delivers observable and significant improvements in workflows. One study discovered that organizations which successfully implement DevOps practices release software versions 46 times more frequently than competitors and recover from failures 96 times faster, all while reporting higher levels of operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Still, simply implementing DevOps practices alone isn’t enough to reap these benefits. Ensuring success begins by adjusting your company’s culture and continuously uncovering ways to improve your structures. To get the most from your DevOps implementations, try out these proven strategies that can help you effectively deploy your new paradigm:
1. Embrace NoOps
One of the core tenets of DevOps is streamlining operations that are repetitive and time-consuming. In an ecosystem where more and more operations can be removed from developers and ops specialists’ plates, there’s little reason not to automate as much as you possibly can. One of the newer and more popular concepts in DevOps is NoOps, which takes automation to the point of abstracting a large part of a company’s development stack.
NoOps focuses on automating your operations to the extent at which they don’t require a dedicated team to manage certain processes. NoOps lowers your costs by removing the need to allocate staff to manage aspects like basic testing, updating repositories, pushing change logs, and more. Additionally, it increases your operational scalability by focusing more on creating compact and fast software releases.
Concentrate on building up your automation tools to free your workers for more important tasks. Tap into tools like Buddy. Works, which help build the NoOps pipelines you need to automate repetitive tasks, improve your workflow, and keep your devs and operations team more productive.
2. Measure Everything
The big data revolution has helped bring new clarity to DevOps by producing tangible, measurable results for every process. Instead of focusing on the bigger picture, companies can easily drill down to the most granular level and understand operations on a much deeper level than ever before. This is positive but is only useful if you have a way of measuring how effectively you’re meeting your goals.
DevOps is all about improving, so it’s vital to pick the right KPIs and metrics to demonstrate how well you’re actually doing. The first step is to define exactly what DevOps does for your company, deciding what challenges you’re trying to solve, and then choosing the right metrics to measure progress. The right KPI may include performance metrics like deployment frequency, deployment time, automated test pass percentage, or error rates. On the other hand, it can include front-end measures like customer tickets completed, response time, and post-failure recovery.
What matters is understanding your workflow, and crafting KPIs that identify where the problems are, and how you can resolve them.
3. Containerize Your Apps
A major emphasis in DevOps is creating serverless systems that focus on scalability and speed over physical infrastructure. Containers offer a more effective way to manage applications and codebases by creating neat packages of ready-to-execute code. Instead of having to use physical test servers or even virtual machines to manage different versions and runtime environments, containers give you everything you need to run an app in a single place.
Most development and IT firms operate not one, but multiple codebases simultaneously, and require multiple users to access the code at different points. While servers make sense to a degree (it’s always useful to have a physical repository) they’re significantly less cost-effective than creating units that take up less space and are more agile.
To improve your DevOps, containers are not simply an option, but a necessity. Focus on creating containers that speed up your deployment and keep it consistent, regardless of if you’re implementing apps on virtual machines, cloud servers, or on-premise machines. More importantly, build a development model that prioritizes containerizing your applications.
4. Chase Down Bottlenecks
The ultimate goal of DevOps and NoOps is to reduce the reliance on humans to a bare minimum. Even so, both models will always require some degree of oversight, especially if you expect them to continue progressing. DevOps is about building operations chains that can simplify workflows and speed up your delivery time, but chains can and do have weak links.
Once you’ve set up your measurables and are tracking your DevOps’ efficiency, you’ll start to notice that some areas flow smoother than others. This is normal, but you shouldn’t let it rest. Instead, track down these weak spots in your production chain aggressively. These points can have a bigger impact on your overall flow than just not working properly. They can create bottlenecks that slow down your delivery time and production cycles while adding stress for your team. Your biggest job should be identifying ways to remove these choke points to constantly improve output.
5. Mine Data Extensively
At the end of the day, one of the biggest benefits of embracing DevOps is the treasure trove of data it collects. Every process, delivery, and implementation produce a variety of data about the development and release cycle that can be invaluable for promoting overall efficiency. Using this data gives you a comprehensive view of your operations, effectiveness, and efficiency. More importantly, it tells you exactly what needs to be done, and when.
In the past, decisions relied on some data, but largely instinct. While you should still trust your intuition, it’s smart to take every data point available to you when making a decision. When it comes to DevOps processes, the data is usually right, and the information arrives almost instantly. This enables you to make the right call every time, backed by the facts.
Get The Most Out Of DevOps
DevOps is a no-brainer when it comes to improving your company’s operations, but it’s not a panacea or a magic wand. To get the most out of it, you must implement it with a long-term plan, and a willingness to constantly improve upon it. Consistently perfecting your standards and automating tools will help you maximize your efficiency while keeping your teams both happy and productive.
