Core Components Your DevOps Team Needs to Be Successful

Critical Components of a DevOps Environment

DevOps touches all aspects of the development and operations life cycle. With DevOps, developers become involved earlier in the process and succeed in getting results quickly. Developers also get more involved in different parts of the process and share knowledge.

For all those aspects, DevOps professionals play a crucial role. They need to master all of the skills to be successful. If they do not have DevOps experience, they should also master the skills. To get that experience, DevOps engineers must take a short DevOps course and participate in a Bootcamp. There are plenty of them out there; in fact, you can do it online too.

Metrics for DevOps

DevOps is all about monitoring, metrics, monitoring, and more monitoring. Humans or automated tools can do the monitoring. Metrics provide us with the information we need. They provide insights into what is going on and help us measure and improve our infrastructure. Automated tools like Jenkins and Opsgenie are great for this. They do all the monitoring for you. That is because they let you focus on other aspects of the process. For example, if you have a manual system with three services that use them and monitor only two of them, it is tough to see whether your processes are working.

Monitoring is critical to DevOps success. The metrics should include a broad range of metrics for multiple components such as operations, development, and infrastructure. These are all necessary for a thriving DevOps environment.

Monitoring must include several tasks. First, it's essential to monitor all the infrastructure assets your DevOps team will be working with. DevOps engineers need to know how they are performing across the entire infrastructure. This visibility is how they can improve and report the problem areas.

Next, it is essential to perform basic infrastructure monitoring across the entire infrastructure. The goal of infrastructure monitoring is to detect any downtime your infrastructure is experiencing. Without this, we are not sure whether our processes are working correctly or have an issue with the infrastructure.

There is also infrastructure monitoring to monitor the applications and the development system. Infrastructure monitoring helps to detect and monitor system resource and performance problems across the entire infrastructure. The goal is to see and investigate these problems quickly to fix them before they impact the application or the user's experience.

The focus here is on monitoring the applications. While infrastructure monitoring works very well in a centralized server environment, it can be challenging in the dynamic nature of DevOps.

Automatic deployment to servers is where you need to improve the process to move fast. This improvement is vital to enabling automated deployment of changes to the application in a low-friction environment. It is also the best way to push improvements to the system without increasing the user experience.

Instead of being focused on the infrastructure monitoring that is described above, we will start with two essential tasks:

Get Started Right, and Don’t Stop

The first thing to do is have a consistent practice of getting started right. There is no such thing as a silver bullet for DevOps. Some people will only take action after they have failed to get something to work. It is not practical or achievable to succeed by waiting. At least, get started. Do not stop.

It is time-consuming to monitor and measure your development and operations systems. The good news is that you have good tools in place to accomplish that. However, you must be aware of when these things are happening. The time it takes to make changes to the processes and tools is a direct measure of DevOps success. Keep the DevOps goals in mind, move forward, and make necessary improvements.

Here is another item that every team needs to stress: Let the developers develop. Let the developers run the development environment. Allow the developers to write the code to run the setting. Allow the developers to create their tests. Let the developers run their tests, and run the tests, and run the tests again. Understand and embrace the iterative nature of DevOps.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are essential and necessary practices. The goal is to ensure that everything is running smoothly, so you don't have any issues arising at a critical moment.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a process where each team member works to integrate the code. It is a process where each developer works to fix issues as they come up and provide code back to the development environment. This continuous process ensures that everything is kept up to date. CI is a significant step in the right direction.

Continuous Deployment (CD) is a process where each team member creates, builds, and pushes the bodies. This process ensures that the build and changes to the code are constantly being tested. This process helps to ensure that no issue arises and that the changes made to the code are always up to date. CD ensures that the ongoing integration process is running smoothly.

As mentioned before, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment should be taken very seriously. CI/CD are among the core practices that will enable your team to achieve the goals set for them. These practices work together, and each has its place to play. However, they are critical and essential to ensure that each team member understands the importance of these things.

Automatic Deployment and Rollback

One of the most overlooked DevOps practices is automatic deployment. It sounds pretty simple, but it is imperative. Automatic deployment allows you to move fast and help create a better working environment for your team members.

Automatic deployment is a process where each developer creates a deployment file. The deployment file is a file that contains the source code, which is released as a branch. The branch is a copy of the source code and is updated as developers push changes. Developers also send the build to the test environment, checking their differences in the testing environment. This process is repeated continuously and takes a short time to complete. It means that you can ensure that you are always keeping up with what is going on.

Automatic deployment makes a more effective environment where everyone understands the importance of every change made. It also helps you as a customer because you never have to see a dev environment. You never have to see a new release is pushed out, which prevents problems from arising.

We should emphasize that all of these practices take time and that it is not realistic or achievable to implement them at once. However, each one of them is essential and integral to ensuring the success of your organization. These practices should be taken very seriously and implemented as much as possible.

Data Security and Governance

All systems are a place for data and information. Data is essential for any organization to be successful. Data helps you create products and ensure that your users have a pleasant experience. A significant problem that we run into is that our system is full of unencrypted data that isn't secured. Your data is an open book, making it easy for hackers to see what you are doing. A hacker can quickly access your company if they have access to your systems and your data is not secure.

For DevOps to be successful, you need to secure your data and protect it from unauthorized access. You should make it extremely difficult for unauthorized people to access your data. That will include limiting the number of times someone can access it and limiting the number of times they can change it. Data should not be stored on shared drives, cloud services, or personal devices.

Look for tools that help you with your security needs. Many of them allow you to create and update your data. They will enable you to maintain security without adding applications and frameworks. These tools are helpful for security, usability, and flexibility.

All in all, you need to make sure that you have robust security and that you have the proper tools in place to ensure that you are always protecting your data. Your data should be critical to you and protected at all costs.

Automation and DevOps

DevOps is a practice where you have to rely on automation to help ensure that your projects run efficiently and smoothly. Continuous integration and continuous deployment are two practices that are essential to getting the best out of DevOps. In a perfect world, you would only have to write code when it is time to build or deploy something. If that were the case, then automation would be unnecessary. However, because developers need to see the results of their work immediately, automation is still necessary.

You should make it very easy for developers to change the code. If there are several variables or a few functions that need to be changed, you will want to incorporate that into the build process. Doing so will allow your developers to keep on top of any problems as they occur.

If your build process includes many pre-build steps that may not be needed, you will want to have a command-line tool that allows you to automate some of those steps. That will let you skip any of the unnecessary steps that can get in the way of your development and testing processes. For this reason, you should incorporate CI/CD into your DevOps strategy.

Interested to begin a career in DevOps? Enroll now for the DevOps Certification Course. Click to check out the course curriculum.

Summary

If you want to be successful, you need to embrace all of the above principles of DevOps. These are the practices that are going to help you achieve your goals. These practices will help you prevent problems before they become problems, and they will allow you to get the best out of your system.

To become proficient in DevOps practices and principles, you can enroll in the Post Graduate Program in DevOps. Offered by Simplilearn in collaboration with Caltech CTME, this program provides hands-on learning in a digital bootcamp format. It culminates in a capstone project that lets you demonstrate your new DevOps skills by creating a solution to an industry-based, real world problem.