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DevOps

Enterprise DevOps - Adoption Strategy and Best Practices

Gursimran Singh | 27 October 2024

Enterprise DevOps Best Practices for Transformation

Understanding Enterprise DevOps

Nowadays, DevOps has become a buzzword across various organizations for software development and enabling companies to achieve scale. We have all heard about the highly demanded software development approach- Agile methodology. It does not replace Agile Practices. However, it provides extra support to complete the project effectively by extending the collaboration and communication with software service providers. So, Let's get started with 
A process in which, Modern software engineering Culture and Practices to develop software where the development and operation teams work hand in hand as one unit, Click to explore about, What is DevOps and it's Processes? 

 

Top 10 Best Practices for Enterprise DevOps Transformation

Test Automation maintains the flow of the Software life cycle

To prepare quality code, developers must frequently and regularly test the software. It allows for early testing that will enable developers to recognize and resolve the issue during software development rather than later. Unlike manual testing in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), automated testing is executed faster to maintain the flow of the Software life cycle.  We can use automated testing for networking and database changes, middleware configuration, and source code development using load and regression testing. Test automation can be achieved by performing various actions such as recognizing test case scenarios, picking up the right tools for automation, setting up an appropriate environment, and analyzing results.  Some Tools Used in Test Automation:-
  • Selenium
  • UFT (Unified Functional Testing)

Configuration Management is Crucial 

Configuration and Change management are fundamental parts of the operations. Configuration management is set automation, monitoring, control, and maintenance of system-extensive configurations that take the environment throughout networks, servers, applications, storage, and different managed offerings. Integrated configuration management enables the improvement teams with a larger picture. It permits the utilization of the existing offerings in the course of the software improvement instead of investing time and effort in reinventing the new offerings from scratch. Some Tools Used in Configuration Management -
An information technology automation tool. By using Ansible, it gets our task done easily by automating it by removing the manual deployment. Click to explore, Overview of Ansible | Configuration Management with Ansible

Continuous Integration and Delivery for Building Modern Applications

Continuous Integration in DevOps fashion allows developers to implement integrations sooner and more regularly. It is a software development practice where the development team frequently updates the code changes within the repository, after which the automatic builds and test runs occur. CI tools help them identify integration-demanding situations in new and current code and change them at the earliest phase. Thus, CI improves group collaborations and eventually builds a high-quality software product.

Continuous integration (CI) is the method of building and validating a project by automated regression testing and sometimes code analysis whenever updated code is checked into the version control system. CI is one of the essential agile development practices that is typically linked with it. CI allows developers to develop a high-quality performance solution safely in small, regular steps by directly providing immediate feedback on code defects to the developer, decreasing the feedback loop time. Some Tools used in Continuous Integration:-

Adoption of Progressive Delivery for Derisking Software Releases 

Continuous delivery is also a practice where the newly developed source code is up to date by using developers and gets tested through the QA group by applying automated testing. Once all test case passes, it gets deployed into production. It permits the development group to build, check and launch the application faster and more frequently in quick cycles. It helps corporations to grow the number of deliveries, minimize the risk of failure during production, and more.

It is an addition to continuous integration to ensure that you can rapidly and sustainably release a new modification to your customers. This means that, on top of having an automated test, you also have an automatic release process, and you can deploy your software with just a click of a button at any time.

Some Tools Used in Continuous Delivery:-

  • Jenkins
  • Buddy
  • Jenkins X
Encourages collaboration and communication between the developers and operations teams in all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle. Click to explore about, Top Six Challenges in DevOps Adoption

Continuous Deployment makes businesses extra responsive

The deployment technique consists of different sub-strategies, along with code creation, testing, versioning, deployment, etc. In continuous deployment, the code is checked and regularly deployed within the production surroundings once it passes all the test cases in QA and other environments. Many tools are available that perform the deployment of the software from staging to production with less human involvement.

It facilitates development teams in decreasing the time within a new feature being identified and deployed into production. It allows the business to be extra responsive. Continuous deployment raises operational risk by increasing the potential for bugs and faults to be added into production if development teams are not trained enough and disciplined. A successful CD in an enterprise environment needs all the practices explained earlier. Some Tools Used in Continuous Deployment:-

  • AWS CodeDeploy
  • Octopus Deploy
  • Jenkins
  • TeamCity

Adoption towards Observability 2.0 

Observability represents a shift from traditional, disparate monitoring tools to a unified approach that leverages structured, high-cardinality event data in a single data store.

This model captures rich, raw events with detailed metadata to provide a single source of truth for comprehensive analysis. By storing events in their raw form, correlation is simplified, supports real-time and forensic analysis, and enables deeper insights into complex, distributed systems. This approach allows for high-resolution monitoring and dynamic investigation capabilities. Observability 2.0 prioritizes capturing high-cardinality and high-dimensional data, allowing detailed examination without performance bottlenecks. The unified data store reduces complexity, offering a coherent view of system behaviour and aligning observability practices more closely with the software development lifecycle.
Application monitoring is essential to optimize the application performance, whether deployed on the cloud or local data centre. If a bug hits the application during the release process, then it will be converted into failure. So, the development teams and operations teams need to consider proactive monitoring and check the performance of the application. Several tools are available for application monitoring that give a lot of metrics related to applications, support, sales, graphs, analytics, etc. This is a required practice in it monitoring running applications once they are deployed on production.

Operating systems, CPUs, memory usage, network usages, I/O services, etc., usually give monitoring abilities that can be handled by monitoring tools and exporters; however, for application-specific monitoring functionality, such as what users are using and user interface characteristics. Everyone on the team should be aware of this operational necessity or have access to the tools that make it easy to scrape and visualize it for the user. Some Tools used in monitoring:-

  • DataDog
  • Splunk
  • Monitis
Monitoring Stack for enabling the visibility of Microservices applications and Continuous Delivery Pipeline with Docker and Kubernetes. Taken from Article, DevOps Monitoring Stack

Production Support is a mandate with SRE Metrics 

Regarding the Enterprise level, development teams are on the new version or release with add-on features, a development that is already present in the production. They are responsible for marking serious production obstacles and working on the new release to increase efficiency and optimize the application. The development team will usually be referred to third-level support because of their involvement in fixing critical production issues. Agile techniques only address this effort in passing. A significant side of this practice is that it provides developers with an appreciation of things that occur in production, giving them learning chances to enhance the way they design Stack in the first spot.

Real-time visibility for DevOps Intelligence 

Deep, real-time Visibility through the entire Enterprise DevOps toolchain and development environments is essential for product teams and stakeholders. A strategy is required that allows product team members to concentrate on deadline-driven activities while also supplying managers and stakeholders with accurate real-time information.

Value Stream Management Continuous Feedback 

Finally, feedback loops are needed to simplify communications between tests that spot problems and tests that your preferred method would help. The best tool would define the problem using either manual or automatic mechanisms and mark it with an object so that the developers or managers would know what happened, why it happened, and when it took place.

DevOps Metrics and Use The Right Toolset

It requires integrating different processes for seamless delivery and enhanced productivity, which requires the right toolset. Some critical areas that require tools include collaboration and communication, API integration, reporting and capturing of manual and automated processes, and customization.

Best Tools for Enterprise DevOps Adoption 

The best enterprise tools are listed below:

  • Jira
  • Jenkins
  • Docker and Kubernetes
  • Git
  • Ansible
  • AWS DevOps
DevOps managed operation
The most potent and environment-friendly software testing technique ensures that the developed software is filling all requirements. Download to enable DevOps for enterprises.

Adopting Generative AI in Enterprise DevOps  

It promotes transparency and incremental implementation, so organizations do not need to make updates from the beginning. By implementing the DevOps practices mentioned, organizations speed up their digital transformation and establish agility.