Introduction
DevOps seeks to improve application functionality through collaborative efforts and frequent updates. You can take several steps to adopt a DevOps strategy. Unfortunately, not every development team creates a process that works well. Improve your chance of success by learning about the following DevOps best practices.
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The Benefits of Adopting DevOps Best Practices
Why should you bother adopting DevOps best practices? Because they can give you a long list of benefits that make your work easier and your products more successful.
Some of the benefits you can expect include:
- Reduced lead time, which means you can potentially take your product to market before your competitors.
- Higher-quality products that continue meeting user needs as they evolve.
- Motivated teams that can spend less time on busywork.
- Increased agility within your department and across the company.
- Faster digital transformation that helps keep companies competitive.
- More consistent release cycles and branding.
Use Automated Tools for Faster, More Reliable Updates
Ideally, you should automate as much your DevOps process as possible. Automation gives your developers more time to focus on building features that matter. Automated tools also help ensure that your updates get released to the right devices at the right time. Explore these options to determine which tools will make it easier for your team to embrace DevOps best practices.
- Jenkins – A tool that can pull approved code from a repository, automate tests, and execute builds with very little human oversight.
- Docker – A container-based platform that lets you isolate applications from infrastructure so you can build, manage, and deploy software quickly.
- Prometheus – A monitoring and alerting system that lets you know when something has gone wrong (such as a process taking much longer than expected) so you can address the issue immediately.
You can get more details about these tools by reading our earlier blog post on the topic: Top 5 Best DevOps Tools.
Focus on User Experience
User experience defines whether people continue to rely on your applications. Even minor defects can encourage them to find alternatives. You might not think that a few spelling errors matter, but they reflect poorly on your product’s reputation. Of course, poor functionality matters much more than aesthetics. If users need to take more steps than necessary, they will eventually get frustrated and delete your application.
Encourage quality assurance by having people not involved in the project test your product. Also, stay open to feedback from users. If your DevOps best practices don’t include opportunities for getting positive and critical feedback, your application will eventually fall behind competitors.
Use Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for Seamless Improvements
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) can form the bedrock of DevOps best practices. From the perspective of CI/CD, apps always need updating throughout their lifecycles. That might sound like a nightmare to overworked developers desperate to keep up with user needs. CI/CD avoids excess work by introducing more automation to every stage of development and deployment.
In many cases, CI/CD can automatically generate code to improve an application. Tools can then test the code to make sure it integrates well with the existing programming. The updates don’t get deployed until the new code passes the integration test. New code can get integrated and delivered to existing applications at regular intervals. You might choose to update code once per day, week, or month, depending on what users expect the app to accomplish. CI/CD doesn’t always get coding perfect, so it requires human oversight. For the most part, though, the process can identify, rewrite, and update apps with minimal interventions. This makes DevOps fast and seamless without adding to your development team’s workload.
Improve your approach to CI/CD by using Packagecloud to store and distribute your software updates. Start a 14 day trial with Packagecloud to see how the cloud-based solution can streamline your CI/CD.
Determine Which Metrics Matter Most
DevOps best practices need to monitor application performance to ensure they function as intended. Measuring every possible piece of data would overwhelm your development process, so it makes sense to determine which metrics matter most.
Some metrics that matter to many DevOps groups include:
- Number of new defects
- Total number of defects
- Build failure rate
- Code coverage
- Unit test pass and fail rates
- Number of successful code builds
- Number of automated tests prioritized by risk
Spend some time thinking about what metrics matter most to your ongoing and upcoming projects. Identifying the areas of performance that matter most to your DevOps best practices will put you ahead of unexpected issues.
How Packagecloud Can Improve DevOps Best Practices
DevOps best practices have one goal: finding faster ways to give users products that match their needs. Over time, you will probably need to add, remove, and alter features to keep users happy. If you cannot reach that goal, they will abandon your product for an option that they prefer. Packagecloud makes it easier than ever to manage your DevOps by giving you a cloud-based service that can distribute software packages to any machine or environment within your system.
Packagecloud takes an agnostic approach to delivering packages, so you don’t need to worry about compatibility between your work and existing operating systems connected to your network. You don’t even need to own an infrastructure to repeatedly distribute packages to their destinations. Packagecloud handles everything from scaling to security to give you peace of mind and more efficiency.
Make DevOps best practices more effective than ever by starting your 14 day trial with Packagecloud. Once you experience the advantages of cloud-based agnostic package delivery, you will see why it makes sense to make Packagecloud a critical tool for your team.
