DevOps Best Practices for Speeding up Development Cycles

The digital era demands more and more to stay ahead. Under this paradigm, tech companies face constant pressure to deliver quality products quickly, efficiently, and securely.

In this context, DevOps has become one of the most important methodologies to optimize development processes, enabling organizations to improve internal efficiency and scale their operations in an agile and sustainable way. The role of the DevOps engineer has become invaluable.

The implementation of DevOps has transformed the way companies develop and deploy software. It is primarily associated with collaboration between developers and operations to improve the delivery and reliability of applications in production. The most common best practices aim to replace manual procedures with more robust automation less prone to errors.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a work methodology based on code development through the use of new tools and practices. Its main focus is to reduce the gap between programming and systems technicians. This new collaborative approach allows teams to work more closely, bringing greater agility to the business, optimizing costs, and increasing product quality.

The term "DevOps" comes from the combination of the words "development" and "operations," but it represents a set of ideas and practices that go beyond that. DevOps includes security systems, collaborative ways of working, and data analysis, among other factors.

Six DevOps practices to improve performance

Applying DevOps is essential if you want your company to optimize development processes. There are six practices where using this methodology can not only benefit the software development life cycle but also impact performance and user experience.

1. Agile project management

The agile methodology is a recurring approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to customers faster and with fewer headaches.

Agile teams focus on delivering work in small increments rather than waiting for a total project release date. Requirements, plans, and results are continuously evaluated, allowing teams to respond to feedback and change course as needed.

2. Shift Left approach with CI/CD

One thing development teams don't need is to deploy new features that contain security vulnerabilities. A disruption or security degradation affects user experience and can lead to significant business problems.

When teams adopt the "Shift Left" approach, they introduce testing in the early stages of code development processes. Instead of sending multiple changes to an independent testing or quality control team, various tests are carried out throughout the programming process so developers can fix issues immediately.

3. Automation implementation

Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) allow developers to merge code regularly into the main repository. Instead of manually checking the code, CI/CD automates this process.

In addition to CI/CD practices, automated testing is essential to the success of DevOps practices. Automated tests can include comprehensive, unit, integration, and performance tests.

4. Pipeline and application monitoring

It is important to monitor the DevOps pipeline to ensure that a faulty build or failed test does not cause unnecessary delays. Automation greatly improves development speed, but if there is a failure in an automated process and no one knows about it, it is better to do the work manually. Automation is essential, but manual testing remains fundamental in certain parts of the process.

Similarly, it is important to monitor applications in production to identify failures or performance deficiencies before they go to market and customers notice and report the issues.

5. Observability standards

As companies in the sector have moved from traditional systems and applications to cloud-native applications, monitoring has become more complex. Teams must consider several best practices to improve application performance, including developing observability and enhancing monitoring.

Observability is based on using three information sources (logs, metrics, and traces) to detect and predict the behavior of a complex system, ensure that every part of the application works properly, and ensure that server processes run smoothly.

By ensuring this element, DevOps teams can gather valuable information to understand how users use the applications, prevent future problems, facilitate customer support, and improve decision-making based on real data.

6. Continuous feedback collection

Continuous feedback ensures that team members have all the information they need to do their job in a timely manner. From a development perspective, the team receives an immediate alert of any fault found, with clear and comprehensive results.

Until a few years ago, there was a widespread belief that a development team could optimize either speed or quality, but not both. Continuous feedback is one of the DevOps elements that allows optimization of both aspects.

Benefits of outsourcing DevOps

While some companies prefer to keep their operations in-house, outsourcing DevOps can offer multiple benefits, especially if they are in a growth phase and need to scale quickly without losing efficiency. Some of the key benefits of hiring external DevOps teams include:

• Cost reduction: Companies gain access to expert professionals and specialized tools without the expenses associated with in-house hiring and training.

• Rapid scalability: Companies can more easily adjust to demand peaks or technological expansions without the need to hire additional staff or acquire costly infrastructure.

• Improved efficiency: With the expertise of specialized teams, companies can optimize their development and implementation cycles, achieving faster and more efficient product delivery.

• Constant innovation: External teams are often at the forefront of the latest trends and technologies, allowing companies to benefit from new tools and practices without the need for constant internal training.

DevOps requires collaboration, transparency, trust, and empathy. If your organization already possesses these qualities, adopting DevOps practices should be relatively easy. The challenge lies in companies that need to develop them, as this will demand effort, time, and dedication.

The most common organizational structures have separate areas of ownership and responsibility, making communication between teams minimal. To succeed with DevOps, these barriers must be eliminated. This doesn't mean there are no specialized people or teams, but communication and collaboration lines should be open and used at all times.

With proper communication and the right tools and practices, you can optimize your operations, improve your team's efficiency, and scale your business effectively. DevOps is within reach; you just have to reach for it.