As mentioned in our previous blog “What is DevOps and the effects of DevOps in increasing efficiency?”, transitioning to DevOps is a cost-effective move. However, that requires a change in culture and mindset, not every organization understands how to adopt DevOps effectively. Two traditionally silo teams, Dev and Ops, need to work together to remove the barriers. Only by taking full ownership of their services and viewing the entire development and infrastructure life-cycle as part of their responsibilities can the two ends of the spectrum increase efficiency and improve the quality of services.
- The mentality between Dev and Ops as well as the skillsets are really different.
- When introducing DevOps models, we need to prove that the new model is better than the “well-defined process” one, which might not always be the case, considering the steep learning curve of new tools and new skills.
- Finally, migrating the legacy system to the new model is a very complicated process, which can go wrong easily.
Therefore, to help organizations adopt and transition into DevOps culture with ease, here are the five key practices on how to adopt DevOps compiled by Reactron:
1. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Releasing once in a while is a painful process. To reduce the burden as well as to make the process less risky, one fundamental practice is to frequently release small updates. It helps the team address bugs much quicker and does roll back easily when things might go wrong.
2. Microservices
Monolith is very easy to develop yet hard to release frequently and be coordinated among team members. The microservices architecture tries to solve these issues by decoupling large, complex systems into simple, independent services. Since each service is operated independently of its peer services and the application as a whole, it will help reduce the coordination overhead costs of releasing applications.
3. Infrastructure as Code
It is a very common process that developers and system administrators “SSH” into a server and perform manual updates every time they want to release a new patch or a bug fix. Though it is very easy to do, this process brings along a lot of issues afterward. One common issue is the snowflake server. It is also not scalable, since no one can perform these tasks for a thousand servers without any human errors.
In order to fix this manual process, the “Infrastructure as Code” practice is introduced. Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using common development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration. Engineers can interact with infrastructure programmatically thanks to the cloud’s API-driven model. Because infrastructure is defined as code, it can be deployed following a common continuous pattern, as well as easy to duplicate in a repeatable manner.
4. Monitoring and logging
Continuously releasing new versions/patches/fixes is not the end of the development cycle. It is very useful for organizations to understand how changes/updates impact their users as well as have insights into the root causes of problems or unexpected changes. Also, since there is a high demand for good service level agreements (SLA), it is becoming very important to monitor actively. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure, organizations can create alerts or perform real-time analyses to help proactively monitor their service, hence guaranteeing good SLO (service-level objective)/SLA.
5. Communication and Collaboration
No technical process can help organizations adopt DevOps culture better than communication and collaboration. It is a key cultural aspect of DevOps. Sharing information and facilitating communication allow all parts of the organization to align more closely with their goals and projects.
We hope these five practices can somewhat help your organizations understand how to adopt DevOps. Should you need further assistance, feel free to reach out to Reactron. We have a DevOps expert in-house.