5 Key DevOps Principles and Best Practices

Every organization's top priority is to stay ahead in the market by creating better products, especially at a faster pace. However, you must develop, test, deploy, and improve the software quicker than ever by implementing the continuous delivery and integration principle. This has made businesses embrace DevOps software development. 

In the ever-changing landscape and evolving technology, DevOps is the need of the hour for most IT teams that have grown leaps and bounds to meet the different requirements of the business. Reports suggest that around 77% of companies have revealed that they solely rely on DevOps to deploy software or planning to do so shortly. The core aim of fostering DevOps tools courses is to bring effective communication, better collaboration, and shared responsibility to the forefront. 

DevOps –An Essential Block in Your Project

DevOps is a software development methodology that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It is a set of philosophies, practices, and tools that lay the foundation of DevOps culture and help a business deliver better products faster by integrating the development and operations functions.  

Here are a few reasons companies should follow DevOps principles to set up the team. 

• As a streamlined software development process, it results in faster new product deployment 
• It requires much less time to market the product when compared with the traditional methodology. 
• DevOps ensures to increase the productivity of the whole team. 
• The feature increases the sense of security and relies on the compliance of the products. 
• It enhances the collaboration of teams, leading to shorter but effective development cycles for production. 

According to the report by Google, DevOps kept evolving and focused on improving organizational performance through reliable and safe software delivery. With the DevOps culture, developers can get closer to the customers to understand their needs and requirements better. It means organizations adhering to the DevOps principles can deliver applications and services at a highly qualified and faster pace than those using the traditional development model. 

DevOps Principles

DevOps aims to enhance the organization's future development by enabling the individual to make intelligent and informed decisions on planning and processing. To realize the full potential of DevOps, a developer should follow key DevOps principles and practices. 

With comprehensive research, we have outlined the 7 Principles of DevOps that every developer must know to drive your team's success. 

1. Foster Better Collaboration and Communication 

The primary premise behind the DevOps concept is that collaboration and communication will fall in the same arena. The development and operations teams co-exist into a functional group, which results in improved communication, feedback sharing, and creating a better collaborative environment throughout the entire development and deployment cycle. 

A DevOps approach results in a collaboration between the teams, where they will be motivated and thrive with a passion for achieving common goals. This, in turn, will create a more positive work environment, where the organization's expected outcomes can be reached more efficiently with enhanced job satisfaction and lower attrition. 

2. Automation in Everything

Automation is another core principle of DevOps: making every phase and activity achieve the targets and goals at ease. More and more organizations realize the need to automate their end-to-end processes. It involves a principle of DevOps to view Infrastructure as a Code, to automatically set the deployment environment to the configuration, despite its initial states. 

Automation is the path towards rapidly new software or service to the customers, from infrastructure provisioning to building new systems. To ensure high quality and production readiness, a unit and multiple layers of functional tests are employed to find potential issues and regressions in the product. 

Bringing in automation at every step will aid in faster delivery to markets, which seems effective in the long run and gains more potential customers. However, DevOps principles do not include refraining from the feature. It might result in poor codes, human errors, an increase in the delivery time, and application downtime in the production. 

3. Improve Performance with Continuous Integration and Delivery

Implementing and practicing continuous integration will support a collaborative environment between the groups, improving overall performance. Ongoing Integration/Development is the process of employing small changes and checking them to version control repositories daily.  

With the diversity of tools and technologies, consistency should be maintained in the integration process so that both teams can share a common responsibility of integrating and validating changes. Some of the best practices that can be implemented to impact positively are. 

• Maintain a single code repository 
• Automate the process and enable continuous deployment 
• Employ version control 
• Secure the whole process 
• Collect feedback regularly 

4. Impose Shared Responsibility

There are separate developer and operations roles in the traditional software development model. But in DevOps, they have to work together as a team, and each member will be involved from scratch till the end, with shared responsibilities and control. Every member of the DevOps culture should know what they are doing and the responsibility of their role in the project, and how they are going to carry it out. 

It enables the professionals to share feedback and knowledge among the team, increasing transparency, improving collective intelligence, and removing constraints. The concept is that there will be no distinction between the operations and development teams, where they will work coherently and accomplish engineering a great product by seeking ways to facilitate other members' tasks. 

You can learn or even brush up your skills while earning certification with this devops online training. 

5. Create End-to-end Workflows

DevOps is a continuous process that comprises all the aspects of business that won't cease after delivering the software. As they say, software tends to develop continuously with regular releases. Hence, this principle of behavior-driven development involves a better understanding of customers’ needs on the created products or services, enabling the professional to solve real-life problems. 

Creating software shouldn't be based on assumptions about how customers will benefit from the product. Instead, the team should follow an end-to-end workflow approach to gain a holistic understanding, from creation to execution. 

6. Customer-Centric Action

DevOps Principles include the other component of Customer-centric Action. The team uses short feedback loops to develop products and services solely centered on the needs of the customers and end-users. This practice will allow the rapid collection and prompt response to user feedback via real-time live monitoring. 

It also allows the teams to gain immediate access to how the users interact with a software system, which will provide in-depth insight to focus on implementing further developments.  

7. Embrace Failure and Learn from it

To fully embrace the innovative principle of DevOps, an organization should modify its attitude towards failure. Remember, everybody fails, and failure is a part of growth. Hence, rather than dwelling on failure, try to redirect your energy and concentrate on your tasks. This concept will make the teams feel emotionally well, thus empowering them to transform their failure into success in the future. 

In addition, having the best DevOps tools help the team to overcome some of the challenges they might encounter in the early stage. Implementing such automation tools will allow teams to work more efficiently and bring them together to lead a more cohesive process and culture. 

Is DevOps a Better Career?

DevOps is a mindset or a cultural shift where development and operations teams adopt new working methods. It has established its position in the global software development community and is oriented toward by more and more IT organizations. If you are looking for a secure and rewarding career, then the exciting world of DevOps could be a perfect choice. 

Wondering Where to Start to Excel Your DevOps Skills?

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