12 Top DevOps Best Practices for a Successful Transition in 2023

Amy Parker
Product Coalition
Published in
9 min readDec 12, 2022

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Top DevOps Best Practices

DevOps has been one of the most exciting and talked-about fields over the past decade. If you’re not familiar with the term, DevOps refers to the collaboration between developers and operations people to speed up the process of software delivery by streamlining application lifecycle processes.

If you are familiar with the term, it’s probably because you or your company have begun using DevOps processes and tools in your daily work, or because you have plans to do so sometime soon. So what does DevOps look like in the future?

Though DevOps best practices don’t change frequently, it’s important to ensure that your company is always on top of its game by developing and implementing the best practices that are relevant today, as well as those that will be in 10 years time.

By following these 12 devops best practices, you can ensure that your transition into 2023 goes smoothly, bringing you and your company further success in the process.

Look At Top 12 DevOps Best Practices in 2023

1. Test Automation maintains the flow of the Software life cycle

Test Automation
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Test Automation is important because it maintains the flow of the Software life cycle. The more quickly you can go from development to testing, the faster you can find bugs and errors.

This will save time and resources by avoiding making changes to code that doesn’t need to be changed or waiting on manual testing. It’s also important to automate your test cases, so they don’t have to be done manually each time. Automated tests allow for quick testing cycles which can eliminate bottlenecks and increase productivity.

You may also want to consider continuous integration tools that are designed specifically for fast integration of code from different sources. These tools typically make sure there are no conflicts between merged codes so that new software updates can be released with minimum disruption to customers.

2. Configuration Management is Crucial

Configuration Management

Configuration management is one of the most crucial DevOps best practices because it takes care of everything from the software installation to configuration and maintenance. Configuration management tools also allow for automation, which is great for scaling systems quickly.

This can be used with Puppet or Chef to reduce manual work. It is also important to have your servers pre-configured when you first get them, so that configuration management can be applied as soon as possible.

By doing this, you will ensure that all of your servers are running identically and more efficiently. You should also set up standard templates for all the major applications in order to make configuration management easier.

For instance, if everyone on your team installs their own version of Java on their server, then there may be some compatibility issues between those installations and applications dependent on Java.

3. Continuous Integration for high-quality performance solution

Devops Integration

Continuous Integration helps teams to build, test, and ship high-quality performance solutions quickly. The following are some best practices for successful continuous integration of performance solutions.

  • Keep your CI processes automated with the help of scripts that can be run locally or on a server;
  • Have one CI server per project;
  • Run unit tests before running anything else — such as code coverage or static analysis;
  • Aim for 100% code coverage when developing new features and functions;
  • Enable ‘Continuous Deployment’ for automated deployment to production environments after each successful CI run;
  • Use an open-source Continuous Integration tool such as Jenkins or TravisCI so you can customize it to meet your needs;
  • Add additional tests to ensure your code is stable across multiple browser types;
  • Automate every step in the process of testing, building, and deploying;
  • Configure CI jobs to run automatically on a schedule (for example: every hour);
  • Split large projects into smaller parts with clear dependencies so that each part can be handled independently by the Continuous Integration system.

4. Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery permits to launch the application faster and frequently, in quick cycles. The frequency of releases should be agreed with the stakeholders. An advantage is that you can get feedback from customers quickly to improve your product.

On the other hand, every time you release a new version there is an increased risk of bugs or errors so it is important to make sure that all of them are handled before shipping.

5. Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment is a crucial element to your DevOps strategy because it makes you responsive. If any problems occur, you will have the opportunity to correct them before they affect your customer. You can release small updates without waiting on large-scale releases, and test quickly with smaller sets of data that are less costly.

Testing must be included in your process so you can stay ahead of errors, so every time you need to make changes and deploy new code, you run unit tests and functional tests against the code. Your code should also be fully covered by automated testing; this includes security testing as well as end-to-end functionality tests which include deployment tests.

6. Monitoring of Software to optimize the application performance

Monitoring the software performance is one of the most important DevOps best practices that you can implement to optimize the application performance. Monitoring of Software to optimize the application performance (two sentences). For instance, monitoring can help you determine if your server has enough RAM and storage to meet current and future needs.

Monitoring of Software to optimize the application performance (three sentences). This will help you plan ahead on which hardware upgrades are necessary or which third-party services need to be evaluated for integration into your environment.

Monitoring of Software to optimize the application performance (five sentences) In addition, by enabling monitoring, you can quickly detect any irregularities in system behavior and proactively respond with troubleshooting measures before such anomalies have an impact on production systems.

7. Production Support is a mandate

Production Support
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DevOps Best Practices in a successful transition to the future: Production Support is a mandate. Modern applications are best designed with production support from the start. A true production-ready deployment means that we must be able to identify anomalies, diagnose them and fix them quickly, all without manual intervention or downtime.

It’s imperative that our data pipeline delivers high-quality data fast enough to satisfy users who demand near real-time access to information. We need a system that can scale up easily and gracefully while maintaining impeccable uptime, both of which require robust performance management with analytics and security features built right into the system, not bolted on as an afterthought.

8. Real-Time Visibility is of utmost importance

Real-Time Visibility
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Real-time visibility is of utmost importance when it comes to managing and scaling your operations. The key is to provide information that is accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible so that you can quickly identify problems and make informed decisions.

As the global economy becomes increasingly digitized and global trade surges, businesses need an agile approach with the right technology to stay competitive and build a more sustainable future.

MightyAI provides this level of real-time visibility with its powerful machine learning capabilities which are designed specifically to detect anomalies on top of what already exists in production as well as trends over time across your entire operation.

Our state-of-the art anomaly detection system also continuously monitors how an application behaves against all sorts of business metrics such as KPIs or SLOs; performance indicators such as latency or errors; or availability by calculating downtime incidents automatically through monitoring logs generated by customers’ applications deployed on our platform.

9. Implement complete infrastructure visibility

This means having the ability to monitor all of your infrastructure components across hybrid cloud environments including on-premises data centers, private clouds, virtualized environments, as well as public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

This is critical for quick action identification and problem resolution during times of peak load or unexpected events such as an outage. It’s also important because many IT organizations are shifting their workloads to a mix of public and private cloud deployments, which introduces new challenges around configuration management, governance, compliance and security.

Without full visibility into both types of environments — and their integration with each other — you’ll be hard pressed to understand what’s happening at any given time.

10. Establish full system monitoring

Photo by Goran Ivos on Unsplash

Full system monitoring enables continuous insight into systems’ configurations and performance parameters in order to spot trends early before they become bigger issues. You need to see everything that’s going on within your systems, not just the big stuff. With this level of monitoring, you’ll have the necessary insights needed to support automation efforts and make real-time changes to meet business needs.

11. Continuous Feedback

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Continuous Feedback is the most significant way to maintain software delivery quality by eliminating defects before they happen. Automated, visual and real-time feedback provides immediate validation of change requests and prevents process-induced variation.

This can be accomplished through integration of Continuous Integration (CI) with Continuous Delivery (CD). Continuous Deployment/Delivery or CD provides all developers and other team members who collaborate on workstreams with the ability to choose their own level of visibility across all stages from beginning to end: from design through coding, testing, production deployment, ongoing product maintenance including support.

For more information about the benefits of Continuous Feedback check out our latest blog post about 5 DevOps Best Practices for Maintaining Software Delivery Quality.

12. Use The Right Toolset

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This list is full of excellent, proven tools that are often overlooked by organizations not actively adopting DevOps. Be sure to work on adapting your organization’s culture before selecting the right toolset to ensure it will be effective when you deploy it. Here are 10 best toolsets, you should be aware of:

  • CI/CD Tools: Jenkins or GitLab-CI with Docker
  • CI/CD Monitoring Tools: Prometheus with Grafana
  • Configuration Management Toolset: Ansible
  • Log Analysis Toolset: Elasticsearch + Kibana
  • Alerting and Metric Tracking Toolset: Graphite
  • Security and Compliance Monitoring Toolset: Splunk
  • Load Testing Tools: Gatling
  • Database Change Management Toolkit : PuppetDB
  • Application Performance Monitoring Tools : AppDynamics
  • Infrastructure Performance Monitoring Tools : Atlas

Conclusion

DevOps is the natural choice for companies who are looking to make a successful transition in the year 2023. But with so much information on how to do it, where do you even start? The answer is Hire Dedicated Developers in India. With such a wide range of qualifications and experience levels, there’s bound to be one that fits your needs just right.

As long as they know what they’re doing, any web developer should be able to walk you through your transition into DevOps without any problems whatsoever!

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Hey, I am a technology consultant at AppsDevPro, a leading Mobile & Web development company that offers offshore mobile, web, frontend, full-stack developers.