8 Basic DevOps Principles and Practices

For years the company administrators were the ones responsible for operations, integration, and development — and developers only had to write code. Before that — all specialists worked separately on projects as there was little communication between the two silos.

Recently, DevOps has been one of the most famous and widely discussed software development processes. DevOps is known to improve product delivery and is extensively used by Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc., and many other companies.

Suppose you have any thought of embracing DevOps for making your business perform better and more successfully. In that case, you have to start with hiring DevOps engineers with a DevOps consulting company.

What do you know about DevOps?

DevOps stands for operations and development and is a practice that targets merging quality assurance, development, operations-basic integration, and deployment. These target areas are combined into a single set of processes and are a natural extension of a consistent approach towards delivery.

Advantages of Adopting DevOps

There are several advantages of adopting DevOps for your business. Here are the three main benefits and advantages of adopting DevOps, covering cultural, business, and technical aspects of development.

• Customer needs fulfillment

At DevOps IT solutions, there is a continuous update and new features for fulfilling customer needs in an efficient and structured way. Resulting which, value-delivery and time-to-market rates increase.

• Improvement in quality and quick product releases

Initiation of continuous delivery and quick release of products is encountered with DevOps. It has improved our services by allowing the developers to fix bugs and encourage feedback early. You will experience better efficiency and better product quality when you choose DevOps.

• Betterment in the working environment

In DevOps, the practices and principles help better communication between team members. This leads to an increase in agility and productivity. Companies that practice the DevOps communication methods are more skilled and productive as compared to others. DevOps team members include operators and developers who work together to help the business run more smoothly. You need to understand that DevOps is more than just actions.

You don’t need any substantial technical changes in your business because the main focus of DevOps is to change the way people work. You get complete success when you stick to the DevOps principle that encourages team communications.

Principles You Want to Achieve With DevOps

Suppose you’re worried about DevOps meeting your expectations and thinking about why you aren’t meeting the level of efficiency, satisfaction, and quality that you expect. Maybe you’re also trying to follow others’ strategies to achieve your goals.

You will want to build an initiative by trying these DevOps principles below.

DevOps Principles for Your Business

Before going through principles, you need to know why and what you will achieve with DevOps. Of course, all businesses want faster software development. If you go with other methods like SAFe, Kanban, Scrum, etc., you may not be able to achieve higher efficiency. DevOps will help you achieve your goals in a faster and more efficient manner.

The efficiency in operations is possible by constantly adapting, testing, and introspection which is part of the developmental process. A perfect DevOps organization can self-heal and adjust to continuing situational changes. By following a few principles, you can work on the betterment of the whole organization without any help from a central authority.

8 Basic DevOps Principles and Practices to Adopt

Creating a Self-Organized System

There are simple rules which, when followed, create a self-organized system. These rules benefit the entire group. In DevOps, the development team has to interact with the service provider without syncing with internal teams. In short, they can have an organized system without having too much internal communication.

Rules which might be beneficial for your organization

• Provide proper access to the work going on right now. For example, instead of emails, use online boards like tasks, meeting notes, projects, discussions, links, etc.
• To avoid mixing up the context, go for one task at a time.
• Make a check on teams’ availability and plan accordingly. For example, we can say people are planning.

You need to give a regular inspection and allow your team to create their way to deal with and implement the rules. The important thing is:

• Accept your slowdowns before speeding up. This will help you grow more efficiently.
• Don’t stop if the first iteration is not the best one.
• Help your workmates on internals.

Instead of Making a Team — Go for the Task Force

We see DevOps as an extension of Agile for delivering the development process and it works by breaking silos between the operations and the development teams. You can use DevOps in other groups as well. A task force works by blurring the line of development and operations and bringing them together as one unit.

The process of changing your normal development team into a task force is not as simple as it may sound. You cannot just achieve this by changing the name from development team to task force — a task force is meant for specific operations which require thorough knowledge.

You can convert your development team into a task force by working on the different aspects that upgrade your DevOps principles and practices.

Tasks as Multi-Competence Centers

A task must be seen as a multi-competence center, and its motive is to get into a project and then help the ops and dev teams speed up their delivery process.

How can technical debt drain your velocity?

• There will be issues if you don’t update DevOps consulting companies with the latest security. Most of the time, companies don’t make any changes unless they face a problem. This leads to data damage and money loss.
• Suppose you don’t make new performance updates; you will slow down your product development.
• Waiting for migration planning to reach EOL creates an impact by slowing product teams and costs more to businesses.

Ways in which task force can help projects are:

• Identify the slow processes – for example, live team working, onboarding interviews, etc.
• Automating the slow process, such as app testing, infrastructure testing, container build processes, ChatOps, the on-demand environment of staging, etc.
• Helping team members with their performance by new-hire helpers, meetups, training labs, brown bag launches, etc.
• Make sure your team continues their work with DevOps IT solutions.

Working With Agile Coaches

We know that agile is an extension of DevOps. Thus, it would be best to have an agile coach for product development. If you feel a need, hire one as you will need an advocate. Your digital transformation is the basis of creating a vision with others. You might generate consensus as you don’t always have the right answer.

Nowadays, most people have an idea and are aware of adopting DevOps. This will show you if you are wrong by keeping the system down. You need to understand the purpose of development. Once you’ve realized your goal, let the agile coach do their task. This is an important step towards progress.

Empower Your Team

Give space to your team. Build trust and make sure they trust you too. Clear your vision on what and how you want to achieve anything. Let your team make certain decisions and work on their ideas. Make sure you have empowered your team members.

Team Training on Skills

Offer highly focused, short, practical training on skills. Train them on the tools that work daily. Your team must get satisfied with their approach. By this, the power of adoption increases automatically.

Soft skills include:

• SSH
• Bash usage on advanced level
• GitLab (ask them for what features could add for the betterment. And tell to differentiate between starter/bronze or ultimate/gold)
• Usage of Git commits, why do we sign them?
• Open SSL
• AWK/SED

Be Friends with Uncertainty

Here is a simple rule

• Firstly, you should know how to take and manage failure.
• Take a small group of developers or engineers on KPIs or on real.
• Give importance to their thoughts and let them work on them.
• Repeat these steps.

Work on KPI reviews, Work on start-ups, know how to control failure, expand and remember to learn from failure, make it an experience, and achieve milestones. Train your team members on how you can prevent them from repeating their mistakes.

Remember It’s Just Not Regarding the Technical Implementation

We know the purpose of DevOps is to help agile extension and improve production by lean development principles. We can also say this is all about the improved delivery process and much more. SRE or Site Reliability Engineering made by Google was present way before DevOps came into the picture and implemented their basic principles. We can see this Agile and DevOps as an evolutionary mechanism to SRE. DevOps is a process that fails, fixes the issues and adapts to the situation, and then repeats it constantly.

Best practices such as CD/CI pipelines and microservices container orchestration help us recover from our failure by design, and they tend to address how quickly we can overcome failures. This is lean and agile by definition.

Being Up to Date Is the Key

Make use of every available resource and update accordingly. In this era of technology, one must be aware of their surroundings and maintain that and use it for your betterment.

You can also subscribe to some weekly newsletter, go to different events, and subscribe to any online or offline channels by joining classes provided by DevOps IT solutions.

Conclusion

DevOps principles and practices are helping several companies to improve and grow their adaptability. Many companies like DevOps consulting companies are a way of survival as they are helping us in every aspect.

Image Credit: Christina Morillo; Pexels; Thank you!