What is DevOps?
Everyone talks about DevOps but what does it mean and how can it help me?
DevOps, at its heart, means taking agile best practices and extending them not just through the software development process but all the way through your production infrastructure.
It means creating systems that can respond to business needs without immediate human intervention. IT systems can scale up, scale down, handle new features and workloads with a minimum of effort. The same way your agile dev team can quickly adapt to new business priorities and create new features, your IT infrastructure is able to do the same. No more waiting on features to go live because the ops team doesn’t have things ready.
Pushing code for the past 15 years for some of the Bay Area’s top companies, we’ve learned a thing or two about optimizing DevOps.
Getting your code to production easily
1. CI/CD Pipeline
This is where it all starts. You have an automated pipeline that takes your code from development through staging to production with automated testing at each step of the way. Integrate CI/CD processes to the application deployment workflow leverages the use of industry standard tools like Jenkins / Bamboo CI / Codebuild / Codeploy to improve time to market deploying high quality applications in a short time, ensuring the minimum down time.
2. Cloud Application Design
Moving on-premise applications to the cloud through cloud architecture engineering reduces costs, improves quality and shortens time to market for delivery. Moving applications to the cloud isn’t about just copying on prem best practices. It’s about being aware of cloud native services that scale effortlessly so you don’t even need to plan for scaling them - it’s already built in.
Make sure it scales automatically when traffic spikes
3. Infrastructure as Code using Cloudformation / Terraform
It is important to implement infrastructure as code so customers can keep control of the current state of their IT infrastructure. This improves on-boarding time for DevOps teams, increases the company wide governance, and allows more granular control using a well defined development workflow.
4. Kubernetes Container Orchestration
Containerize your services and move out from the classic deployment model, improve scaling and guarantee high available services in the cloud using Kubernetes, ECS and Fargate.
5. Lambda Serverless Automation
One of the best ways to scale is getting rid of the notion of a server all together. You can automate recurring processes using AWS Lambda. This creates a common frame for the DevOps team to improve manual processes executed in Cloud Environments, using tools like serverless framework and AWS SAM.
Monitoring and responding to production issues effortlessly
6. Logging and Monitoring
Implement solutions that allow customers to review logs from their applications and provide monitoring setup to trigger alerts based on thresholds or events. This is implemented as a core principle for customers that allows fast performance development teams to focus on the delivery rather than the complex troubleshooting using proven tools in the industry like Sumo Logic, Splunk and Elasticsearch.
7. Alerting with SRE tools like PagerDuty and OpsGenie
Connect your application monitoring in real time to the SRE teams that will make sure your services are all the time up and running. Include performance metrics and take action whenever the application is at risk to create outages affecting customers.
Make sure it's locked down
8. Cloud Governance and Security
Implement AWS Landing Zones / AWS Control Tower for more granular control and security compliance aligned with industry standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018. Focus on security using proven tools like AWS Guarduty for intelligent threat detection.
Get rid of day to day overhead
9. Automation
More and more clients require automation for daily basis activities, like removing unused volumes or updating DNS registries after a deployment, a DevOps engineer can help to identify common manual activities and provide an automated solution to save costs and time allowing to focus the efforts on improving time to market.
And make it cheaper...
10. Cost Optimization
Optimize costs and audit your usage across different cloud vendors by using audit and cost containment tools combining proven cloud architecture patterns and best practices.
As you grow and your IT infrastructure becomes more complex, you don’t want legacy, inefficient DevOps practices slowing you down. If you’d like to chat about how we can help improve some of your DevOps processes, click here to set up a quick 15 minute call.
