The corporate world has been flipped upside down by the year 2020. Virtualization emerged and took over everything. For meeting clients to work from home, companies took advantage of the newest cloud computing trends and technology. 

Just like Technology presentation templates aid you in presenting your work effectively even in virtual meetings, similarly, cloud computing is evolving gradually, focusing more on how to make the two means meet effectively. In addition, new technologies and trends are being introduced to integrate cloud services well in businesses. Among these is a set of practices known as DevOps. 

Many people have trouble implementing DevOps. If that’s the case with you, then you are at the right place. We have gathered a little piece of information here regarding your concern, but before we proceed to its implementation, you must have a thorough understanding of DevOps. 

Read more: 5 DevOps Services Trends to watch in 2021

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a collection of practices that encourages greater cooperation and automation between operational and development teams. The aim is to combine both ends into a single efficient entity that can release new products faster with fewer employees and less time spent on them.

DevOps as a service allows engineers and developers to work together in harmony and create new communication standards, encouraging closer cooperation, more seamless integration, and the digitization of low-value operations.

However, when you opt to implement DevOps in a company, you must ensure that you know and learn about the following for better implementation:

1. Basics of operating systems:

  • Having knowledge about fundamental OS concepts gives you a better understanding of DevOps. It enables you to write more quickly and establish interaction among components of the system. Moreover, it helps in optimizing processing and managing storage effectively. Having the ability to manage critical processes would result in increased productivity. 

2. Networking:

  • Having a thorough understanding of how networking works, maintaining security, and identifying networking problems is critical for running and administering a linked network system.
  • The team should know some networking fundamentals such as IP addresses, TLS encryption, and firewalls for better implementation. Besides, it would be best if you also had a good grip over other networking protocols and standards, such as HTTP, DNS, SSL, and so on. 

3. Programming language:

  • DevOps is primarily concerned with a programming language. Hence, you may know any programming language to implement DevOps successfully. Without knowing a programming language, you might risk writing ineffective code that is prone to mistakes and inflexible.
  • Being familiar with a programming language ensures that you examine system resources and properly manage them. Moreover, it enables you to produce an error-free code that makes you vulnerable to portability, optimization, and scalability. Therefore, learning programming languages such as C, Python, Java, C#, and Ruby would help you to process better with DevOps.

4. Cloud Deployment:

  • Cloud deployment is a new revised DevOps method for configuring a set of servers, such as application, networking, infrastructure, database, web server, and so on.
  • Cloud deployment eliminates the need to change configuration files and enables dynamic scaling up and down of servers. Nginx is one of the software that may help you navigate your servers in a more advanced way.

5. DevOps Tools:

DevOps is a set of practices, and to perform them well, your IT team must consider the right tools, some of which are:

  • Code repositories enable several developers to work on a single code. It gives developers full authority to revert to the previous code and check the code when in need. In addition, it also enables the developers to keep track of changes done in the source code. 
  • Containers are isolated software runtimes that offer abstraction so that code may operate on a variety of underlying infrastructures, from development through validation, staging, and finally to production. 
  • CI/CD pipeline engines allow teams to automate the validation and delivery of applications to end-users at regular intervals throughout the development lifecycle. 
  • The configuration management system allows IT teams to use scripts or templates to supply and modify software, communications, and infrastructure. Moreover, the team can build up to deployment settings for software code updates and enforce regulations on servers, virtual machines, and containers. Chef and Puppet are the two configuration management tools.
  • Cloud providers are used to automating DevOps scaling, deployment, and other management tasks. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are two of the most popular cloud services. In addition, CI/CD services are available from several cloud suppliers.
  • Monitoring tools are used to track the reliability and security of code deployments on systems, networks, and infrastructures. They can combine surveillance with operational intelligence-generating analytical technologies. 

As you progress through the learning level, you’ll go deeper and will get a much clearer picture of DevOps, what it is and what you’ll need to get started. Now let’s get practical and see how best implementation can take place.

Read more: 5 Common DevOps Mistakes and How to Avoid them

Best Practices for Successful DevOps:

To meet the fundamental goals, follow the practices discussed below:

1. Investigate Your Company’s Requirements:

Examine your company thoroughly; look where it stands, what it needs, and where you want to see improved. Evaluate every aspect of it. Please don’t go for DevOps without evaluation; it’s possible that your company might be in need of something else and not truly DevOps. And if that’s the case, then your hard work and time would go to waste, which you can effort as a company owner. Thus, do not adopt DevOps merely because it is trendy but because it is necessary for your business to match with DevOps goals.

2. Smaller is better:

If you want success with DevOps, then you must start small because that’s the only key to it. Small setups will enable processes and release cycles quicker rather than in larger projects. If you opt for DevOps with a larger setup, then the project must be broken down into smaller pieces in DevOps to process well. Thus, smaller is better.

Starting smaller, you will have an option to upgrade gradually within time. This will serve as a cherry on top because slow adaptation helps you perform better and efficiently.

3. Customers should be your topmost priority: 

Never ever lose sight of your customers. Their satisfaction is at the heart of all agile development processes, including DevOps; hence, it should be your first priority on the list. Keep in mind that you can’t set your project’s ultimate goals until you prioritize client happiness. So try to meet their needs and win their hearts. Focusing on client needs will keep the DevOps team on pace. 

4. Select appropriate tools:

DevOps is incomplete without tools. Hence, select appropriate tools to make things go smoothly because if you don’t, then both the development and operations teams might end up in a dispute. You need to select tools that are compatible with one another and fit with your IT infrastructure. We would suggest getting a tool that is capable of performing more than one thing, so you don’t have to handle too many.

5. Go for Automation:

DevOps does not imply automating all processes; it only aims to automate those processes that have the ability to produce better and more efficient outcomes. As a result, determining when and where to automate is critical. Code authoring, resource configuration, networking, load testing, and other types of testing may all be automated. 

Encourage automation wherever is possible because it saves a significant amount of time, manual labor, and money; your valuable asset.

6. Ask for Feedback:

Incorporate a feedback tool. it serves to be essential for each project, regardless of the type, as it guarantees openness. Make a feedback loop that includes the DevOps team, stakeholders, customers, and end-users. It aids you in quickly recognizing risks, limitations, and flaws. Doing so will enable you to make modifications on time and according to their needs which will result in better performance. Besides, asking for feedback builds trust among stakeholders and users as it reflects your passion and how much you value them.

Conclusion:

Summing up with the hope that the above discussion would have been enough to clear your thoughts regarding DevOps. We guarantee you the best results if you take into consideration the given practices. So give them a try and witness your business flourish at an incredible pace.