10 DevOps Best Practices for the Cloud

At one point or another, we’ve all felt the pain of lengthy deployment and siloed development. New code can take weeks to be published in production, causing delays in making important updates. Lengthy deployments cause a variety of problems:

• Competitors can beat you to market if they’re able to deploy their products at a faster rate.
• Developers have trouble managing development code and may run into errors if it takes a long time for production code to be updated.
• When your computing demands grow rapidly, you must add more servers. In new server environments, code may need to be altered to run properly, which is why code deployments are often infrequent. This can cause more errors that must be fixed, making time-to-market even longer!

But there’s a way development and operations teams can collaborate better and become more productive. DevOps is a collection of software development best practices that shorten the systems development life cycle and enable you to better update code and support business goals. By leveraging DevOps best practices on the Cloud, your firm can enable faster product delivery, highly stable environments, and enhanced team communication and collaboration. And that leads to more productive teams and happier customers.

10 DevOps Best Practices to Put to Work

DevOps can offer your business many advantages. But you’ll need help from an AWS managed services expert if you want to fully reap all the benefits of implementing DevOps best practices on the Cloud. By working with an experienced AWS Managed Services Partner, you can learn to apply DevOps best practices, particularly regarding the use of containers and infrastructure as code (IAC). Here’s 10 DevOps best practices to create a scalable cloud infrastructure that can easily increase code deployment speed and reliability.

Build a Culture of Teamwork and Communication>

Perhaps the first way to use DevOps best practices is to improve teamwork and communication throughout your organization. DevOps’s processes can connect the workflows of your development and operations teams through automation. It promotes smoother communication using wikis, issue or project-tracking systems, and chat applications. This allows teams across your organization to collaborate more closely on business objectives or multi-team projects.

Infrastructure as Code

DevOps also offers best practices for managing and provisioning an application’s technology stack using a variety of techniques, including continuous integration or version control. You could also leverage AWS CloudFormation, which enables you to describe and provision every resource using a single language.

Logging and Monitoring

When managing logs and monitoring application and infrastructure performance, you can use DevOps best practices to identify the cause of problems as they arise. Amazon CloudWatch can be used in tandem with DevOps best practices to analyze data and create insights to better log and monitor applications, address changes in system performance, gather a single view of operational health, and optimize resources.

Uninterrupted Integration

Your developers can combine code edits within a shared archive on a routine basis to automate tests and builds. This practice can be implemented by using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild, which enable you to easily write and edit workflows.

Microservices

An approach to software design that builds applications by breaking them down into groups of smaller services, microservices architecture makes applications easier to build and manage. They enable developers to concentrate on adding the functionalities an application needs rather than on the specifics of writing code, making services highly adaptable for many use cases. You can also use this best practice to break your applications down into easily manageable services that require shorter development times, or write them using varying technologies.

Observability

Observability is a critical aspect of maintaining efficient and reliable cloud operations. By integrating comprehensive logging, metrics collection, and tracing into your systems, you gain valuable insights into application performance and infrastructure health. This proactive approach allows you to detect and resolve issues swiftly, often before they impact your users. Effective observability not only enhances system reliability but also provides your DevOps team with the data needed to make informed decisions and continuously improve service quality.

CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) are fundamental to modern DevOps methodologies. CI/CD pipelines automate processes of integrating code changes and deploying them to production, facilitating frequent and reliable updates. This approach shortens the feedback loop, allowing for rapid identification and resolution of issues. In adopting CI/CD practices, you enhance code quality, reduce deployment risks, and accelerate time-to-market, aligning your development efforts closely with business objectives.

Use the Right Tools

The right tools can enhance collaboration, streamline workflows, and improve overall efficiency. From version control systems to automation and monitoring tools, choose solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure and support your specific needs. Investing in the right technology stack simplifies development and operations and empowers your team to deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably.

Automation

Automating repetitive tasks such as code deployments, testing, and environment provisioning reduces the potential for human error and accelerates your development pipeline. Automation tools streamline workflows, enabling your team to focus on higher-value activities that drive innovation and business growth. Implementing strong automation strategies ensures consistency, efficiency, and speed across your development and deployment process.

Seek Feedback

Regularly seeking and incorporating feedback is essential for improving your applications and processes. Engaging with users and stakeholders provides valuable insights into their needs and experiences, guiding your development priorities. Establishing feedback loops through surveys, user testing, and analytics helps you refine features and address pain points effectively. By actively listening and responding to feedback, you ensure your solutions remain relevant and user-centric, fostering greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Engage Expert DevOps Partners to Implement Best Practices

A highly qualified team of DevOps experts can help you leverage microservices, and containers, and recover quickly from outages. They can use DevOps to automate workflows and infrastructure, monitor application performance, speed code deployment, and instantly scale their infrastructure to meet fluctuating demand. But as with every other customized solution, DevOps experts can accomplish all this by working closely with your team, and by following steps that have worked for countless clients in the past.

A good AWS Managed Services Partner will always spend time learning about your business goals before implementing any technology. That’s because the solutions they present will be determined not only by the latest AWS innovations but also by your business’s specific requirements. This also means finding ways to make your environment more efficient, less prone to human error, as secure as possible, and friendly on your wallet.

When you engage a qualified AWS Managed Services Partner, they’ll begin by developing a roadmap of how to use technology to drive your business’s growth and innovation. They’ll find more ways to add automation, such as by spinning up resources on demand. This roadmap can include ways to expand the capabilities and benefits of AWS containerization, including with Docker and Kubernetes. They can plan to run and scale containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and increase deployment speed.

Finally, an AWS managed services expert can help plan to automatically manage and provision resources in your environment using IAC. This can include using AWS CloudFormation, which uses a text file to model and provision all the resources your applications need, throughout regions and accounts.

Your development and operations teams can do great things. But your teams will never achieve greatness if they are bogged down by siloed development or communication, lengthy deployments, or manual tasks that waste time and create errors. Instead, engage DevOps experts who can leverage DevOps best practices that give your teams the tools they need to unlock their full potential.

Getting Started

We’re confident we can help you overcome your DevOps challenges too. How can we be so sure? Because we’ve successfully helped many clients before. SERVIZ was one of them.

SERVIZ is an online platform used for scheduling home repairs and maintenance. Its old infrastructure wasn’t very available or scalable, it didn’t have automated deployment processes, and its servers required manual configuration by the SERVIZ team. This made their infrastructure difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to manage. However, Mission’s Managed DevOps changed all of this. By implementing a scalable and highly-available architecture for the client’s websites, Mission was able to solve all of these problems. Now, SERVIZ can quickly deploy new features or fixes, and their websites are highly available and scale with use. They finally have happy customers and reliable infrastructure they can count on.

By applying DevOps best practices, Mission helped boost SERVIZ’s profitability. Our DevOps experts can optimize your cloud infrastructure and unlock your team’s full potential as well. Learn more about Mission Cloud’s AWS DevOps consulting services.