7 DevOps Best Practices You Should Be Following Now

In traditional engineering organizations, development and operations teams are often siloed, a scenario that can lead to friction between them. 

For example, developers are encouraged to write and release more and better code. Operations engineers are responsible for preventing errors and bugs from affecting customer experiences. 

As a result, operations teams frequently serve as gatekeepers and can significantly slow deployments down – to ensure everything works first.

DevOps solves this problem by improving collaboration and encouraging teamwork between development and operations/quality assurance. Both teams become committed to satisfying customers at every stage.

The benefits of adopting a DevOps approach for engineering teams include:

Adopting a DevOps culture can be challenging, despite the benefits. In this article, we share cloud DevOps best practices you can follow to optimize your workflows and results.

Related Article: The 11 Best Cloud Cost Management Tools In 2022

DevOps Best Practices To Follow

In this section, we’ll share tips for making the most of your DevOps team and resources for your business.

1. Build a collaborative culture

The whole point of DevOps is to improve collaboration and eliminate silos between development, operations, and quality assurance teams. This way, the software can be developed and shipped to customers faster. 

Achieving this level of collaboration requires a change in the culture and mindset of the entire engineering team as well as a common goal or set of goals.

Both developers and operations engineers have to take full ownership of the software development process and work together to meet customer expectations. 

In DevOps, development and operations become a part of everyone’s responsibilities irrespective of their specific roles in the team.

2. Put customer satisfaction first

Whether you’re using the classic waterfall model or a full DevOps approach, the goal is to meet customer expectations.

For example, among the top expectations of modern SaaS customers are constant updates and fast delivery of new functionality. 

DevOps gives you the ability to streamline the release process. Since the same people are managing releases of code as well as writing new code, it’s easier to push new functionality out to the customer faster.

On the flip side, some industries may not appreciate shiny new functionality delivered every other week. 

A new feature delivered in the middle of a working day will most likely not meet the needs of an ICU nurse doing serious work on a patient. Understanding your customers in their context is key to a successful DevOps approach.

3. Use agile project management

Agile is an iterative project management approach that helps software engineering teams execute higher-quality projects faster. The four main principles of agile project management are:

In simple terms, an agile methodology acknowledges that requirements and solutions will evolve as you gather customer feedback; it also empowers your team with the ability to adapt and respond to those changes.

While most customers expect new features fast, engineers also need the ability to see how end users are making use of functionality so they can get feedback and iterate on it. 

By combining DevOps with an agile approach, you can release a small piece of functionality and see how customers respond to it and get their feedback. 

Instead of spending two quarters to fully develop a feature that ultimately misses the mark, you can iterate on it along the way.

The agile principle of small, iterative pieces of development ties in well with the DevOps approach because it results in even faster deployment.

4. Adopt continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous integration (CI) is a core DevOps best practice that is used for integrating code changes from different contributors into a central repository. CI allows developers to merge code changes frequently and use automated tools to test the code’s correctness.

CI is achieved using a source code version control system. The rationale behind CI is that it’s easier to detect errors and quality issues in smaller amounts of code than on a large codebase written over an extended period.

Continuous delivery (CD) continues where continuous integration stops. Continuous delivery is a DevOps practice that gets the code from continuous integration into production.

With continuous delivery, software deployments become painless, low-risk events that can be performed at any time. This way, the deployment of even the largest complex applications become predictable activities that can be performed on-demand.

5. Monitor the right metrics

Continuous performance monitoring is a DevOps best practice. The effectiveness of a DevOps approach can only be measured by tracking the right performance metrics, such as lead time, mean time to detect, and issue severity.

Monitoring these metrics is also important because it allows you to detect when things go wrong so you can recover quickly. 

The DevOps metrics you track will depend on your organization’s goals and expectations. Some metrics, such as unit cost, are useful to any engineering team because they are tied to profitability.

Monitoring unit cost as a DevOps metric is a good practice because it helps you build cost-optimized software from the get-go. This is because you get early insight into what your costs are so you can plan your projects and make trade-offs proactively.

6. Use the right tools

Automation is at the heart of a successful DevOps practice. Automating the process of building, testing, and releasing software makes life easier for both developers and operations engineers who collaborate in a DevOps organization.

You’ll need access to DevOps tools that help you achieve this, whether it’s a tool that tracks your performance metrics, raises alerts when things go wrong, or provides overall visibility into the progress of your software.

For example, CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform that helps you monitor unit costs per customer, feature, or team, and also provides anomaly detection alerts for cost. If you accidentally ship some code that causes a cost anomaly spike, CloudZero proactively notifies your team.

Since CloudZero puts costs in context, it not only detects the spike in cost but notifies the team that owns the code. 

Engineers are notified via Slack so someone can then investigate the problem. If you’ve shortened up your software life cycle and embraced DevOps, then you could fix the anomaly almost immediately and save your business money.

But if you were using a different release process that requires many levels of testing and gatekeeping, you’d probably have to wait for an overnight compile, which slows down the process so you can’t fix the cost problem immediately.

While you’d still test and stage code with DevOps, the difference is this: When the same team handles both development and release or deployment, you’re able to respond faster and keep your costs under control.

7. Switch to microservices

Microservices architecture is the approach of building a single application as a set of small services. It’s different from traditional monolithic architecture where the user interface and access codes are combined into a single program. 

In a microservices architecture, smaller applications are deployed as independent services which are tied together through an application programming interface (API).

Microservices fits into the DevOps approach of breaking large, complex projects into smaller pieces. Different services can be worked on independently without affecting the entire system.

Microservices also support other DevOps practices such as continuous integration and delivery, ensuring speedy and steady deployment.

8. Seek continuous feedback

Continuous feedback is a cornerstone best practice in DevOps because it encourages teams to optimize processes and fosters a culture of ongoing improvement.

This approach involves regularly collecting and analyzing feedback at all stages of the development journey. This includes planning, coding, building, testing, deployment, and monitoring.

You can use this feedback to determine what your target audience or customer actually wants versus what you envision for the product. You can use this data to prioritize features and capabilities in your product roadmap, as well as reallocate resources to the most requested features, fixes, or updates and satisfy your customers.

Getting direct feedback can also help your team improve product quality, identify and correct internal issues, and streamline workflows faster.

Additionally, continuous feedback also fosters collaboration between developers, operations staff, and other stakeholders, encouraging a unified approach to problem-solving.

Ultimately, implementing this practice leads to more resilient systems, faster time-to-market, and a more agile, responsive development environment.

9. Automate tasks where you can

DevOps emphasizes automation because it speeds up software delivery and minimizes errors.

It incorporates Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) to ensure frequent, error-free integration and efficient deployments. Other areas where automation improves efficiency include:

The key to automation is to define clear automation goals and create reusable workflows. Practicing continuous monitoring of key performance indicators and sharing best practices across your teams goes a long way, too​​​​.

10. Build automated testing

Continuous testing, backed by logging and auto-alerting provides vital operational insights – without the risk of things breaking in a production environment. 

These help ensure your system runs as expected under varying levels of load. A robust continuous testing platform, such as ChaosMonkey or Gremlin, can help you thoroughly test your system’s components in a safe environment.

It can help your team identify and fix any potential issues quickly before releasing the code to the next phase. This proactive testing can save you time, talent, and money by eliminating tech debt; the need to remediate issues after a release.  

What Next: Use Profitable DevOps Best Practices With CloudZero

Ultimately, every software engineering team wants to build profitable software that meets customer needs. Unfortunately, too often cost becomes a hindrance rather than an enabler. 

Finance strives to keep costs low while engineering strives to build the best technical solution. The result is a tug-of-war between the two, resulting in canceled or overbudget projects (both bad for your bottom line and competitive advantage).

CloudZero can change that for you. 

With our cloud cost intelligence approach, you get to:

Don’t just take our word for it. Engineers at HighRadious, Applause, and Remitly use CloudZero to reduce cloud costs and increase efficiency. Drift also saved $2.4 million through CloudZero, while Neon increased cost ownership by 700%.

This is your chance as well. Schedule a demo today to experience CloudZero for yourself. We have a Certified FinOps expert ready to show you around, too!