Software development practices have drastically changed in the past few years to put more emphasis on quick project releases, better collaboration, and to achieve the ability to manage products in a better way, and much more. All these practices are easy to achieve by including DevOps in your SDLC.
Despite the success of DevOps in reaching mainstream lingo for the software development industry, the process for the same is still not well identified by many organizations.
If practised correctly, DevOps can bridge the gap between development and operations and streamline all the related processes for fostering an environment that offers quality output.
Talking about the primary aim of DevOps, it aims to smooth out the transition between active development and functional release.
Ideally, these processes must be performed in an automated environment that may or may not require manual assistance.
If this is the end goal, then DevOps must have different procedures and practices to streamline the process. In most of the standard releases, the process contains four different stages.
Contents
Here Is A Brief on All the Four Stages:
1) Scheduling
It is all about documenting and planning a schedule that could either be a singular event or multiple releases. The process needs detailing practices from all the teams that would be involved in decision making. This is the planning stage; so, insights from every member matters.
2) Compatibility
This process involves confirming that components of upcoming releases are compatible with each other. This process will include everything right from software methods to API to third party libraries.
3) Environments
While transitioning from staging to release environment, it is important to maintain the integrity that is required for this particular shifting. There would be some minor adjustments from one environment to the next, so the transition needs to be really smooth.
4) Rollbacks
This process is all about allowing for any given software release to be rolled back to a previous version if required. It is a safe solution when unexpected errors occur like a hardware failure or a transition error.
Also Read: How to boost DevOps with Machine Learning Lifecycle management
5 Techniques for Improving DevOps In Software Development:
1) Defining DevOps Pipeline Efficiently
DevOps method is now the standard practice in development that helps developers and other professionals engaged in the project to remain aligned with the workflow. The already defined DevOps practices help push out higher quality software faster.
The principle behind DevOps is to write code, run it through robust testing, get feedback, work on fixing bugs if found out in the testing, then push the code for deployment, monitor its progress and then repeat.
If the processes are performed carefully then the procedure for software development gets really easy. The DevOps model emphasizes on the idea of testing early and often to receive actionable feedback.
2) Use Metrics
DevOps team must understand the project from the core and should have a clear oversight on their roles. To do the job successfully, they will have to monitor key performance indicators DevOps metrics in order to determine the cause of the issues. DevOps practices could give insightful information on elements related to current load, uptime, and performance.
This information will help to identify weak points and to plan and implement strategies that suit them best to not only the DevOps team but to the entire team. This will encourage right coordination among the team members
3) Integrate Automation
Automation is one of the trends that has got all the potential to improve DevOps efficiency really well. With the help of automation integration, organizations can easily create recurring scripts and workflow for the processes that are on repeat.
With such a process becoming a part of their ideal proceedings, DevOps team can create more opportunities for team members to pursue every task strategically and lessen the burden of one-off projects.
When the team doesn’t need to focus on every single task ongoing in and around, they can focus on more important tasks related to development processes.
Also Read: Software Testing at the Speed of DevOps
4) Incorporating Security into DevOps Line
DevOps pipeline approach is phenomenal in fixing bugs much earlier in Software Development Lifecycle, or SDLC. On the security front, it was left as a secondary consideration for the security team to handle the same.
However, in recent times, developers have started taking responsibility for security of software, which means they need an environment that could help them embrace the DevSecOps model that could help them invest their efforts in the best practices.
Similar to the DevOps model, DevSecOps allows developers to check regularly and easily in order to keep an eye on the development procedure.
5) Using Containers
It is a great move for developers to use containers alongside DevOps. It helps optimize the process and brings efficiency for the developers.
Although containers may not seem the perfect solution required to developers, they do provide a way to manage applications with great ease.
The process can thus ultimately help in ensuring that resources are aligned appropriately and that no time is wasted. This efficiency will ultimately help strategize the processes for any future opportunities.
Bottom Line
No doubt, the road to DevOps is long but eventful, it will help developers uncover the weak spots, and work on the points that are redundant but are still there in the company pipeline.
With the use of DevOps metrics, all the processes would get streamlined and effective; thus, helping to improve overall company efficiency.
