8 Top DevOps Practices and Core Principles You Must Know

DevOps has emerged as a critical methodology for delivering high-quality applications quickly and efficiently. By integrating development and operations teams, DevOps fosters a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and automation. However, mastering DevOps requires more than just adopting the latest tools and technologies. It demands a deep understanding of the principles on which DevOps works and what practices are used at all stages of product development. 

Below, we’ve compiled the 8 top DevOps practices and core principles that will be useful to both companies and DevOps professionals.

5 DevOps Core Principles

During the formation of the DevOps culture, 5 main principles were formed that affect product development, introduction, and maintenance. Specialists briefly call these principles CALMS, which stands for:

• Culture. Creating a common information space for the complex and effective work of teams and specialists with different specializations is a must. The principle also implies open communication for quality product development, testing, and implementation.
• Automation. Automating all kinds of tasks simplifies workflow and improves product quality. In this case, continuous software deployment technology is introduced.
• Lean. It means constantly analyzing processes and eliminating those that slow down development and reduce efficiency. This helps to find bugs, fix them, and test new features and tools faster.
• Measuring. This principle implies that the frequency of bugs, the time customers use the product, and other performance criteria are evaluated to improve the product.
• Sharing. Shared responsibility for product development and implementation mistakes and successes improves effectiveness. The work of developers and other specialists is closely related. The better they work together, the better the project cycles run.

Next, let’s move to the 8 top DevOps practices you must know.

Top 8 DevOps Practices In 2024

Now, let’s look at the top 8 DevOps practices engineers use in their work.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Having accomplished his tasks, the developer creates a working copy of the future application. However, different functional groups of specialists still work on it, each regularly making changes to the working version. Therefore, continuous integration involves automated products, systems, and services (for example, TeamCity or TFS/Team Foundation Server), which run the project build after each change and notify all participants.

The main purpose of CI is to integrate code from different developers into one base. It helps to:

• Speed up delivery because changes can be made immediately in the database, and you don’t have to wait for a release.
• Reduce risks because you can check the code for errors and fix them at once.
• Optimize resources because the correct code in the database can be implemented in other projects and speed up the development process. This means that developers will create code in another project faster.

So, CI helps to detect and fix integration problems in time and automates the application build process.

Automated Testing (AT)

When the build is ready, its automatic testing begins (using unit- and UX tests, integration tests, etc.). 

Practicing automated testing is always useful if you want to increase your team’s productivity level. It is important to remember that automated testing comes in different types and solves specific problems:

• Unit tests help to test individual modules. They are usually short and run more often than others.
• Integration tests determine how different modules integrate with each other.
• UI automation tests show whether the UI performance meets specific customer requirements. They usually last a few hours but are less expensive than having a Junior QA engineer on staff.

This practice does not provide manual tests, the results of which often depend on the human factor. As a result, with automated testing, you can promptly and accurately assess the state of the assembly and save resources (automatic tests are always cheaper than manual ones).

Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous deployment (CD) used to be used only by developers. But now, this practice is actively used to automate the deployment of configuration changes. When the build is ready and tested, you start its automatic installation in the selected environment: test or working (product).

With CD, you can optimize resources and automate the delivery process without much specialist intervention.

Automated Recovery (AR)

Automated recovery is necessary for one simple reason. Imagine you are deploying a product, but a bug has appeared. With AR, you can roll back to a previous version so that users can continue to use the product. The developer will have time to fix the bug, test the fixes, and roll back to the latest version again.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure management is performed not through physical configurations but through automated storage files. Configuration files and environment variables are stored in a centralized repository – where the software code is stored. Employees who need to change configurations or environment variables simply change them in the repository, and the updated data will automatically appear on the server.

In other words, developers will treat application configuration the same as code. Specialized automation tools (Chef, Puppet, and others) are used for this purpose. The result is the ability to optimize resource utilization and reduce delivery time. The IaC approach also removes the need for manual configuration editing (which takes a lot of time and resources) and speeds up the process of making changes to the assembly.

Configuration Management

All data about the software used and its configurations are detailed and stored in a database. The record includes software versions and updates used, network addresses and physical location of hardware, etc.

This optimizes the configuration management process, allowing you to quickly find configuration errors.

Load Testing

With load testing, you check the application’s performance under planned workloads. Simply put, you check whether the application can work correctly when hundreds or thousands of clients start using it.

It allows you to identify build problems before the end customer discovers them. As a result, this improves build quality.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Today, APM can be a strong tool for monitoring an application’s state. Developers no longer spend much time analyzing logs; rather, they configure a certain metric and monitor changes. With such monitoring, it is possible to both control technical aspects and collect important internal characteristics of the application.

Load testing helps detect many problems and bugs before customers start using the application. However, it is not always possible to foresee how the application will behave in the product environment and how customers will interact with it. Performance monitoring solves this problem by checking software availability and responsiveness to user requests.

So, application performance monitoring (APM) provides information about application problems in the product environment and optimizes the computational load between functional groups.

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IBM’s Approach to DevOps

More than 30% of companies worldwide use the concept of interaction between developers and operations personnel (DevOps). This includes major players who have become flagships in the IT market: ExtraHop, Serena, OpTier, CollabNet, IBM, and others. Their experience can be very valuable for companies that are just planning to move to DevOps.

IBM is the largest American company specializing in software and hardware. According to the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), it is also one of the five companies that have already used the DevOps model at all application lifecycle stages.

How does IBM itself see the concept of DevOps? “It’s an enterprise’s ability to continuously deliver software that enables its customers to capitalize on market opportunities and reduce the time it takes to get customer feedback.” 

But how do you organize an enterprise in this way? The experts at IBM cite 4 approaches to help make it happen.

IBM’s Approach to DevOps: Driving

IBM compared software development to driving a car. The driver does not have a clear plan of action—he makes it right on the move because he has to constantly react to the road, weather, and other road users. He acts according to the situation. This is what you should do when implementing DevOps. 

You choose a working methodology (car) and adapt it to specific business processes (road conditions). At the same time, you consider that processes are changeable, and the methodology will have to be adjusted regularly. To begin with, IBM experts advise determining the company’s current resources and its clients’ main needs. Having analyzed them, you can choose which DevOps elements are reasonable to implement here and now.

IBM’s Approach to DevOps: Development and Testing

There are already 2 methodologies used here:

• Collaborative development. Specialists of different profiles work on software creation: programmers, analysts, department managers, testers, etc. To implement DevOps, they need to ensure continuous integration. Developers should integrate the results of their labor with the results of other specialists and then test the “combined” performance. This will not only bring previously isolated specialists together (which is what DevOps is all about), but it will also help discover project weaknesses.
• Continuous testing. Program code (whether it can work in different deployment environments) and the application itself (whether it functions correctly at different stages of the life cycle) should be tested. IBM uses service virtualization for testing, which allows you to create a model of the production environment and test the performance of its individual elements.

Great, let’s move on.

IBM’s Approach to DevOps: Deployment

A logical continuation of the continuous integration concept implies the creation of the so-called delivery pipeline. It includes the application itself, environment configurations, and linking software and databases, thus ensuring continuous delivery of the application throughout its life cycle. 

What is continuous delivery? It is the ability to deliver the application to the end user in a regular, efficient, and automated manner. And that’s pretty much the core mission of DevOps.

IBM’s Approach to DevOps: Exploitation

There are 2 methodologies here:

• Continuous monitoring. It gives developers data on the functioning of the application at all stages of the lifecycle. Monitoring allows them to evaluate the effectiveness of the release and promptly make changes to the business plan.
• Continuous feedback. It shows how consumers use and evaluate the application. And it also allows you to identify vulnerabilities and take measures to optimize the application.

We hope that these recommendations will be useful to everyone who is interested in DevOps but does not know how to approach this trendy but not yet fully understood concept.

How Can OS-System Help You With DevOps-as-a-Service?

DevOps as a Service is a common DevOps implementation pattern. It suits companies that would like to outsource product operations to third-party experts. However, OS-System is not just a third-party DevOps partner: we are ready to participate in your project as actively as an in-house team.

A separate team of DevOps engineers will be assigned to your project. L1 specialists will help them to react to events in time, and R&D and internal development teams will help them apply the right tools and approaches. Our approach to DevOps consists of 3 elements:

• Standardization. Our goal is to deliver results using optimal, proven methods and technology that are already considered industry standards. This way, we can guarantee our customers a high level of quality and service. We only invest in the development of new solutions if there are good reasons to do so.
• Flexible technologies. We choose open-source solutions that interact with a diverse tech stack and are applicable to a multitude of tasks. Therefore, developers are not limited in their needs: projects can be written in any language and use any technology.
• System solution. We offer system solutions, not individual components. If it’s a Kubernetes cluster – it already has all the necessary tools for production. If it is monitoring – it is multilevel.

Let’s discuss how you can benefit from DevOps as a Service approach!