The DevOps philosophy is simple: Bring development and operations teams closer together in the tech product-building process. Companies that swear by DevOps tout improvements in team speed, efficiency, and collaboration as well as higher-quality finished products.
While the theory may be uncomplicated, if it’s not executed properly and thoroughly, its advantages are unlikely to be achieved. Below, 20 members of the Forbes Technology Council discuss some DevOps best practices that are often overlooked by tech teams and why these practices are important pieces in the DevOps puzzle.
1. Adapting To External Changes
DevOps is not just a vision or a methodology; it’s a culture. How well it is adopted is reflected in the behavior of an organization. All organizations are fundamentally tech at the core. One DevOps practice that is often overlooked is updating predefined structures when external change is recognized. In a continually changing environment, it is essential for organizations to stay up to date. – Abhijit Mazumder, Tata Consultancy Services
2. Staying On Top Of Technical Debt
Working on technical debt is often deprioritized in favor of business needs, and the consequences might not be seen until everything crashes down. Teams often postpone software upgrades until the termination of official support. As a DevOps organization, you then have to allocate time and resources to catch up on missed upgrades. I recommend addressing small technical issues proactively before they escalate into problems. – Nadya Knysh, a1qa
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3. Change Management And Incident Management
DevOps principles are based on improving the coordination and communication between development and operations, which allows for faster, higher-quality software deliveries and improved customer experiences. It’s essential to consider change management and incident management when evaluating the cultural changes necessary in any DevOps undertaking—both are key capabilities of IT service management. – Ali Siddiqui, BMC Software
4. Documenting Processes And Configurations
A simple, but often overlooked, DevOps practice is the comprehensive documentation of processes and configurations. It aids in knowledge sharing, troubleshooting, and onboarding. It fosters collaboration, ensures continuity, and reduces individual dependency. Ensuring adherence requires consistent checks and quotas, as less experienced junior staff may resist implementation. – Sheraz Ahmed, STORM Partners
5. Incorporating Security In Solutions
Security is one aspect many DevOps teams ignore, and this is usually due to the urgency of delivering solutions. Too often, DevOps teams depend on the security in the cloud, assuming that it’s adequate to protect their code. In other cases, DevOps teams do not think security should be part of their processes, since there is a separate team that manages cybersecurity in the company. There is nothing as good as having a secured code! – Nihinlola Adeyemi, ErrandPay Limited
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6. Developing And Testing A Pre-Launch Playbook
Staging simulations (despite scale differences), version rollback, and snapshot recovery are crucial DevOps practices that are often overlooked, leading to cloud deployment outages. DevOps teams must create a playbook and extensively test these practices prior to launch to ensure stability, efficiency, and high-quality products and mitigate risks. – Suman Sharma, Procyon Inc.
7. Distributed Tracing
With the shift to cloud-native and microservices, distributed tracing has become a mission-critical tool for gaining complete observability over entire, end-to-end application flows. With the rise of OpenTelemetry, the industry-driven open source standard, barriers are removed so that teams can embrace distributed tracing for better business outcomes, including reduced mean time to repair and increased developer productivity. – Maya Mandel, Helios
8. Continuous Monitoring And Feedback Integration
Continuous monitoring and feedback integration is one of the most essential DevOps practices that is often overlooked. By regularly following this practice, teams can detect issues early on, refine the application for better stability and reliability, and make data-driven decisions that increase the chances of success. – Dhari AlAbdulhadi, Ubuy
9. Establishing An Environment Of Shared Success And Values
Software developers have a roadmap and a set of priorities; however, sometimes security can squash innovation. The companies that are successfully implementing DevSecOps flows are doing so by creating environments around shared success and values. This can also be achieved through the intentional addition of security personnel to the development teams. – Tim Reed, Lynx Software Technologies
10. Blameless Post-Mortems
One overlooked DevOps practice is conducting blameless post-mortems after incidents or deployments. This promotes a culture of transparency and learning rather than finger-pointing. It’s critical for continuous improvement, process refinement, and reducing future errors, thus enhancing product quality and team performance. – Amitkumar Shrivastava, Fujitsu
11. Creating And Maintaining Knowledge Assets
Creating, sharing, and maintaining knowledge assets is extremely important to the success of DevOps. Often, it’s a practice that does not get enough attention until the product is deployed—at which point, a team usually wishes they had spent more energy thinking through what was needed to enable their future agility and responsiveness. – Richard Ricks, Silver Tree Consulting and Services
12. Automated Security Scanning
Automated security scanning is a must in DevOps. Incorporating security testing in the pipeline detects vulnerabilities early, preventing breaches and reputational harm. Prioritizing security testing automation safeguards data builds user trust, and ensures system integrity. Moreover, it nurtures a security-conscious culture, encouraging teams to collectively uphold a secure development environment. – Gaurav Aggarwal, Avanade Inc.
13. Making DevOps A Companywide Initiative
Integrating DevOps into the company as a whole is a practice that can fully maximize the value of technology across the entire organization. Traditionally a combination of IT operations and software development, DevOps should be an organization-wide methodology that goes beyond these two sectors to create value for all departments. – AJ Abdallat, Beyond Limits
14. Configuration Management
Configuration management practices are typically pretty loose, often because of lax governance and discipline when it comes to the software development life cycle and DevOps management within an organization. Poor configuration management can cause issues in release management and production, making it difficult to establish the solid continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that are essential to DevOps’ value. – Leonard Lee, neXt Curve
15. Version Control
Version control is an often-overlooked practice. By implementing version control, teams can achieve greater stability, consistency, and agility in managing their infrastructure. This practice is consistent with the broader DevOps culture of treating infrastructure as code, and it promotes collaboration, automation, and efficiency throughout the software development and deployment life cycle. – Farhan Masood, Soloinsight Inc.
16. Proactive Systems Monitoring
A common oversight is neglecting proactive monitoring of systems. It’s not enough to simply react to issues as they occur. Proactive monitoring of infrastructure and applications allows teams to predict and mitigate potential issues before they affect end users, leading to increased reliability and a more positive user experience. – Sandro Shubladze, Datamam
17. Chaos Engineering
Often overlooked, chaos engineering involves intentionally introducing failures into a system to test its resilience. By simulating real-world disruptive scenarios, teams can uncover hidden vulnerabilities before they manifest in live environments. Rather than simply reacting to issues, this proactive approach ensures systems are robust and adaptable and downtime is minimized. – Andrew Blackman, EZ Cloud
18. Avoiding Fragmentation
In large enterprises, multiple teams often work at different speeds and at varying DevOps maturity levels. They might use different tools for similar tasks, creating silos and inefficiencies. This fragmentation can lead to significant problems, including compatibility issues, difficulties in collaboration, redundancy of efforts, and an overall slower pace of development and deployment. – Daniel Knauf, Material+
19. Reshuffling Teams
An often-overlooked DevOps practice is the periodic reshuffling of team compositions. By rotating team members between projects, teams can foster cross-pollination of ideas, knowledge sharing, and diverse problem-solving approaches. This enhances team adaptability and creates a more cohesive and collaborative environment, ultimately boosting productivity and innovation. – Jagadish Gokavarapu, Wissen Infotech
20. Knowing When Not To Follow DevOps Practices
Tech teams must recognize when not to follow DevOps practices to avoid adding unnecessary overhead and effort to more straightforward projects. Contrary to some beliefs, there can be a threshold where robust continuous integration and continuous delivery processes and workflow may increase development times instead of reducing them. – Dustin Verdin, Zipline Logistics
