DevOps is a cultural philosophy as much as it is a methodology. DevOps encourages collaboration between development and operations teams and enables businesses to innovate and deliver new products quickly.
A DevOps model also maintains reliability and scalability, ensuring secure, quality changes in infrastructure and allowing businesses to manage that infrastructure at scale.
From a methodological level and security perspective, DevOps is an evident answer for eliminating siloed work and promoting collaborative culture within an enterprise. A strong DevOps model is also a solution for true digital evolution.
In this post, we’ll uncover the potential of DevOps and offer best practices for implementing a model in your organization.
DevOps Enables Full Application Ownership
A DevOps model encompasses three components of software development at a foundational level: continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD), operations, and quality assurance (QA). Most developers are familiar with the CI/CD pipeline and have open-source CI/CD tools such as Jenkins at their disposal to build and deploy products. Yet when it comes to operations and especially QA, developers must look beyond their keyboards to be truly successful — to production and beyond.
This is where a strong DevOps model comes into play. By integrating development, quality assurance, operations, and DevSecOps teams, DevOps gives enterprises full ownership of an application from design to deployment.
Depending on developer tools and frameworks, DevOps can also implement QA into the CI/CD pipeline, giving developers the capacity to set up quality gates such as code coverage, linting, or configuration validation themselves. From an operations standpoint, DevOps tactics prioritize proactivity rather than reactivity regarding the health of applications, keeping the customer or business user happy and the developer (relatively) stress-free.
By automating many manual components of deployment and integrating QA, operations, and CI/CD, DevOps gives developers more time to create applications, write code, and innovate, which improves code delivery and turnaround time — ultimately maximizing business value.
Best Practices for DevOps in Your Enterprise
What does an effective DevOps model look like? What are some best practices for enterprises seeking to implement one? An effective DevOps solution should enable all aspects of the development process, suit an enterprise’s specific business needs, and seamlessly integrate CI/CD, QA, and operations.
Too often, we see businesses pursuing DevOps solutions that are overly complicated, with too many steps and too little visibility for developers. Such approaches end up breaking or compromising the acceleration-by-enablement ideology of DevOps by creating fragile development pipelines. Developers should begin their DevOps journey with visibility: identify all existing pipeline steps and ensure teams have full access to the entire pipeline.
Also, it’s critical to unify codebase configuration so that every repository relies on the central pipeline or branching policies.
From there, best practices include:
- Freeing the development environment of manual approvals.
- Establishing a testing timeline based on business requirements.
- Implementing clear monitoring practices.
We also encourage codifying configurations (such as worker size, queue setups, policies, etc.) to support environment stability and building a reliable branching strategy within a version control system.
A best practice for DevOps quality assurance is to establish a comprehensive list of rules, tools, and documentation in readable, human terms and code review terms. This will allow developers to communicate the testing process to business teams in language they can understand. It also automatically enforces quality rules inside the CI/CD pipeline. Additionally, embracing a “build once, deploy multiple times” mindset is vital for development teams operating under a DevOps model, as this brings peace of mind to business and C4E teams.
Ultimately, the most important thing to consider when implementing a DevOps model is what is best for your organization and its cross-functional needs — not what is most popular in the industry at the moment. Above all, this will ensure a DevOps model suited to your specific demands, where the power of the real digital evolution lies.
MuleSoft as a DevOps Solution Leader
As a MuleSoft partner, AVIO stands behind Mule DevOps as an industry-leading solution for businesses looking to power their digital evolution initiatives with an effective DevOps model.
MuleSoft offers a comprehensive suite that allows users to stay within the MuleSoft ecosystem for their integration needs, including code development, monitoring, deployment, and maintenance. The fact that users can address all aspects of the API lifecycle within a single suite is what truly distinguishes MuleSoft from other integration platforms.
Additionally, MuleSoft allows users to manage APIs and automate configuration across all environments in conjunction with other solutions like AVIO’s deployer and meet monitoring needs with custom and built-in dashboards.
In short, MuleSoft offers the technology solution developers need to support a sustainable, reliable DevOps model that drives innovation within any organization at any scale. You can learn more about Mule DevOps and best use practices in the MuleSoft CONNECT Session Advanced Mule DevOps.
Interested in learning more about Digital Transformation/Evolution and DevOps? Reach out to us! We can help you evaluate and recommend the right model for your business.