Building DevOps best practices: A guide for DevOps and platform engineers

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DevOps is undoubtedly the most popular software development methodology in the current landscape and still growing strong. Its ever-growing demand can be attributed to the fact that, when properly embraced, it brings efficiency, speed, scalability, cost savings, and so much more. Not just empty promises—real, tangible results.

DevOps and platform engineers are the ones responsible for implementing DevOps. So in this article, we’ll discuss best practices you can follow to ensure your DevOps adoption is a success.

Best practices in DevOps

Every DevOps implementation differs depending on many factors, for example, the specifics of the business, its commitment to adopting DevOps, the industry it caters to, and the technologies in use. 

It also changes based on the approach of the engineers applying it. Although DevSecOps, platform, DevOps, and service reliability engineers share a lot in common, they will have different focus points. Ultimately, however, their goals are common, meaning the core principles of DevOps can be universally applied.

Collaboration and communication

This is the most important and, at the same time, the most misunderstood and neglected aspect of DevOps methodology.

In the past, developers, operators, infrastructure, and network engineering crews would barely talk to each other. Everyone just “did their job” and dropped off the artifacts at the doorstep of the next team, expecting them to do the same until project completion. 

Unfortunately, instead of quality, this approach mostly resulted in lengthy games of “who’s to blame” and other silly misunderstandings. One could even say the rise of the “well, it worked on my machine, it’s an ops problem now” joke (and the subsequent birth of Docker) was due to this fatally flawed approach.

Neither DevOps engineers nor platform engineers are meant to make decisions and execute them all alone. Collaborating on the development process, sharing feedback, and discussing the difficulties—all of this leads to a greater understanding of its intricacies. The dev process can then be better tailored to the needs of the entire team, as well as benefit from its collective experience, focus, and technical expertise aligned on the same target.

Infrastructure as code

Describing infrastructure as code solves a few key issues with traditional infrastructure management. In contrast to manual operations, infrastructure code can be used with various means of automation (and also automates some stuff for you) to significantly decrease the time and effort required from human operators for provisioning and maintenance. 

Configuration changes can also be tracked. This way, if the real state of the infrastructure diverges from the expected outcome, for example, due to a manual action or incident, there’s a record of what you had in mind and what has been done; this can then be inspected and restored.

At some point, human intervention becomes too time-consuming and prone to error for live infrastructure. Reusability of code makes traditionally impossible feats, such as provisioning dozens or hundreds of machines in a matter of minutes, not just possible but quite easy, too.

IaC tools are simply too beneficial to ignore, especially at a certain scale. So make sure to get the most out of their implementation in every project.

Continuous integration & continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD)

Instead of huge blocks of changes, DevOps emphasizes delivering smaller, incremental improvements more often. CI/CD, as a process of automatic building, testing, releasing, and deploying code, reflects that focus very well.

Offered by all major VCS providers, and innumerable external platforms, CI/CD pipelines are vital to the quality of your code, as well as the speed of its development. Most dev processes usually consist of three main stages: the build process, execution of tests, and integration; this last is where changes become part of the main codebase. CI/CD isn’t limited to just the application development, though. GitOps applies the same treatment to infrastructure code.

The entire point of CI/CD is to enhance collaboration via continuous feedback, allowing for early issue detection. Rolling back a failed change is also much easier, which makes integration and deployment tasks more reliable to begin with—and less disastrous when things turn sour.

Automated testing and quality assurance

The continuous feedback from CI/CD pipelines wouldn’t help much without testing. Human beings aren’t exactly the best when it comes to checking a lot of specific conditions at once, especially conditions that have to be tested precisely, without any margin of error.

This is why automated tests are an invaluable QA tool in the arsenal of every engineer. A properly automated test toolkit delivers exactly what you need: a goal-oriented, exact assessment. It won’t forget to check something or miss a line. 

Integral to the DevOps principle of small, incremental improvements, automated tests are one of the best ways to ensure changes made will be actual improvements instead of regressions. Testing covers simple things like code formatting, as well as preemptive security scans. They can even report on themselves; for example, coverage testing tells you how much of your code is actually tested.

Security integration (DevSecOps)

Automated security tests are one of the main focus points for DevSecOps, an extension of the DevOps methodology that addresses its overall lack of focus on security.

DevSecOps introduces shift-left as one of its most important concepts. This means, instead of traditionally handling security matters at the end of the software development lifecycle, it should be included in the design and implementation at every step of the way. With this approach, many issues that can slow down or even prevent a product launch can be avoided, and those that do get through will take much less effort to fix.

DevSecOps also promotes describing security, governance, and compliance with code, allowing you to further improve the security posture of your application and infrastructure. This is due to easier collaboration, better reliability and short feedback loops of CI/CD, and insights from automated testing.

Every DevOps and platform engineer should get familiar with at least some of the key principles of DevSecOps, as it is now the norm for vulnerable businesses to fall victim to threats—and the threats are becoming more and more dangerous.

Monitoring and observability

Monitoring and observability aren’t just essential for DevOps adoption but the well-being of the business in general. This importance stems from a simple fact: You can’t study, understand, troubleshoot, properly react to, or protect yourself against something you don’t even see.

Monitoring and observability complement each other: The first focuses more on measuring specific values to get a general status while the second prioritizes understanding the cause that spawned the issue at hand.

Although mostly associated with security, both also play an important role in the development process. The insights produced by application performance monitoring (APM) tools, log analytics, or synthetic monitors can be leveraged to precisely pinpoint the root cause of an issue—down to a specific line of code—in minutes. And issues that are detected and located faster can be resolved faster.

Examples and tips for DevOps practitioners

DevOps outlines a lot of best practices, which can be overwhelming. Luckily, there are tips to make following them a lot easier and more effective.

• Never underestimate the power of an honest and open discussion. Foster an environment where developers are understood, avoid absolutes, and always try to find common ground.
• Apply rules and standards for code readability and clarity. Leverage ecosystem-specific tools to quickly spot and resolve human errors, avoiding trouble later on. 
• Add static security testing to the mix to identify potential vulnerabilities and unsafe misconfigurations before they impact infrastructure. A clean, consistent, regularly tested infrastructure codebase improves deployment reliability and saves time. 
• Use built-in caching methods and pass artifacts between pipeline stages to avoid unnecessary builds; otherwise, CI/CD pipelines for some projects might execute slowly.
• Properly leverage automated testing; fine-tune tests to avoid false positives and stay on top of real issues for quick root cause analysis and mitigation.
• Integrate security into your projects from the very beginning. 
• Consider static code analysis a staple of your pipelines (for both app and infra code). 
• Use dynamic testing on ephemeral environments to maintain good security posture (again, for both app and infra code). 
• Leverage observability and monitoring. Even simple setups can make a huge difference in time-to-remediation. 

On that last point regarding monitoring: With the abundance of open-source tools and free tiers of commercial products, a few minutes of quick instrumentation and data analysis might tell you more than a few days of debugging at no additional cost.

Common challenges in DevOps adoption

Adopting DevOps may be difficult for some businesses, especially considering the significant shift in mentality and approach required. Even if DevOps is an already mature methodology, stakeholders are often hesitant to make such a huge leap from known techniques already in use into the unknown.

Fully embracing DevOps requires commitment. Partially incorporating DevOps methodologies brings some benefits but might also come with downsides, serious enough to defeat the initial purpose. 

This commitment is especially hard to apply to legacy or aging projects, where things done in a certain manner from the very beginning could fall apart when faced with a shift of this magnitude.

Embracing the main principles of DevOps will help you overcome these hurdles, i.e., communication, collaboration, and collective effort toward a common goal. 

Companies must bring all developers and stakeholders into the discussion, share the cultural and technical benefits, and make sure everyone is on the same page. Address the risks and uncertainties, design an actionable plan to mitigate these, and patiently clear up any misunderstandings.

Lastly, leading by example will inspire your team to uphold the same values and provide a window into the opportunities for change. Actively observe DevOps practices to demonstrate the benefits to be gained.

Incredibuild: Make your DevOps implementation a success

Automation saves time, but for projects at scale or that require a lot of computational work, the pipelines might take ages to finish, which makes getting constant, quick feedback impossible. 

As the leading platform for accelerating your builds and tests, Incredibuild allows you to significantly cut the execution time of your CI/CD jobs. Following the principles of DevOps, it breaks down big, monolithic tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces; it then spreads them around vast pools of compute resources, yielding results up to 20x to 30x faster.

In addition, Incredibuild allows you to securely use the idle processing power of machines you own, handing them background tasks without interfering with the users working on those machines. This way, you can make the most out of your existing hardware, significantly reducing the upkeep costs of your projects.

Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineers

The incredible success of DevOps as a methodology cannot be understated. It offers solutions to common problems previously left unchecked, which would then lead to the failure of many projects and businesses. 

Although it might be hard to adopt at first, the obstacles to DevOps can be overcome by following best practices and staying true to its core concepts.

DevOps and platform engineers have to understand the development process, constantly look for opportunities to improve it, and promote collaboration both within their teams and across the business. Although approaches to DevOps might be different, by working together, you can pave the way for a successful transformation of the company and enjoy a smooth, hugely beneficial DevOps implementation.

Incredibuild has numerous success stories. So take a look! Our platform gives customers better, faster pipelines, resulting in DevOps at blazing speed. 

Interested in learning more? Check out our free trial to experience how we can help make your builds, tests, and deployments lightning-fast.