DevOps is a methodology that improves productivity, maximizes efficiency, and speeds up the software development process. DevOps is the most flexible development approach combined with numerous tools, practices, and philosophies to make the software development process more agile and progressive. This is one of the biggest reseason why software development companies are rapidly moving to DevOps environment from the traditional approach.
According to Statista, it is estimated that the market for software development will reach $659.0 billion in 2023 and that it will grow at 5.42% between 2023-2028. Developing custom software is a very competitive market, and ensuring that the development process is efficient plays an important role in meeting customer expectations. The use of DevOps in this scenario is one of the best practices that help to improve the process and speed up solutions delivery.
However, implementing the DevOps roadmap is challenging & many companies fail to do so. If you are a business planning for a DevOps implementation roadmap, then this blog is for you. In this blog post, we will go through the DevOps implementation roadmap, including the best practices and the advantages of DevOps.
So, let’s get started with the basics!
What is DevOps?
DevOps refers to an acronym for operations and development team. DevOps is an agile development methodology widely used in the software development industry. DevOps combines the best practices, techniques, and other tools that organizations use to build and deliver fast and efficient software solutions more efficiently.
It is not possible to set rules for every organization since each has its own approach. Improved collaboration between operations and development teams is one of the core aims. The best methodology among them is DevOps. Other methodologies are also present in the market.
What Is a DevOps Implementation Roadmap?
It is crucial to include a visual summary as part of the DevOps roadmap so that the organization can easily accomplish the DevOps objectives. These are used as the best blueprint to implement DevOps best practices. The main goal of DevOps implementation is to provide high-quality products to improve efficiency and streamline the processes and the customer experience. It involves high-end automation and unique practice. These also streamline & simplify team activities for managing the resources properly across the quarter.
DevOps Implementation Roadmap: The Best Practices
DevOps implementation refers to a concept used to integrate development, operations, and testing departments in cross-functional software development teams. The main goal of DevOps implementation is to bring the agility of the IT services and streamline the software development process.
It is generally recognized that DevOps implementation can be split into three sections: DevOps Continuous Integration (build), DevOps Continuous Testing (test), and DevOps Continuous Delivery (release). It enables businesses to change their software development methods according to the DevOps concept instead of relying on traditional approaches. Here are the best practices for the DevOps implementation roadmap;
1. DevOps Initiative
Ensure that you are well-prepared when it comes to bringing a new concept or adopting new technologies into the workspace. When the team starts using DevOps, they are stepping away from their traditional methods, which they are used to. Therefore, you should analyze the current situation and develop a report on what needs to be changed and what resources would be required.
Here, the CIO handles everything and finds the best possible way to arrange financial investment. In addition to this, the program manager will have to create and monitor the DevOps implementation process.
2. Create a DevOps Strategy
In this step, you will need to create a DevOps strategy where the project manager has to rely on various DevOps best practices, principles, and tools that foster communication and collaboration between operations and development. It will also include finding new methods of infrastructure provisioning, software development, and QA testing.
One of the best DevOps practices is to automate the complete software development, including software integration, app deployment, unit testing, app testing, and introducing new concepts and processes that make the software development and testing process much faster and easier.
In addition, you can implement IaC to ensure you get the early provision of the IT infrastructure, depending on the request of software developers and testers. This is done at the time of creating a new build or checking its overall quality. It allows DevOps developers to work in a new software development & testing infrastructure, reducing human errors or repetitive tasks.
3. Set Up a Competent Team
Make sure that all members of your team are eager to learn new skills, regardless of whether your business chooses an in-house or outsourced model. In addition to having solid knowledge and expertise in DevOps, your team must also be technical experts to ensure they are ready to take any challenges that come down the road. Ensure that your DevOps team has a release manager, SecDevOps engineers, QA & testers, and automation experts to ensure they can handle everything from start to finish.
Furthermore, you and your DevOps team need to think out of the box and develop new ways or innovative solutions when setting up complex scenarios. Your DevOps team must have the patience to debug and troubleshoot the issues or bug fixes, no matter how many times it is needed to get to the bottom of the problem. Having the right DevOps team is the key to making DevOps road implementation more efficient and successful.
4. Containerization of your app
With containerization, you can run an application by combining the code, configuration, and dependencies into a single package. Containerization simplifies the software deployment process, which previously required downloading the appropriate software version. Managing this process is now easier, allowing the DevOps team to make changes or updates quickly and efficiently.
Apart from that, containers are an ideal choice for a microservices architecture used to break down your app into different microservices. With Microservices, you and your DevOps team will be able to focus on providing independent pieces of functionality while automating the testing, fostering rapid deployment, and ensuring the highest level of product quality.
5. Implement the CI/ CD pipeline
The process of continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery make the development process easier and faster. Continuous integration is responsible for configuration, packaging, and code management, such as defect detection, code integrations, and product quality improvements.
Furthermore, continuous delivery checks the readiness to release as an extension of continuous integration. Continually deploy code to production environments by automating the process. Another significant aspect of continuous monitoring is integration into the pipeline
6. Automate Testing
Now is the time to automate the testing process to speed up the DevOps style and get more agility with DevOps implementation. Automate the testing process as much as possible, but ensure that it is done correctly and efficiently. Once you are done with setting up automation testing to the process, you remove the need for your developers to spend days trying to fix code written weeks ago since checks are run as soon as new code is completed.
If you are not sure how to do that, here are a few steps on how to perform automation testing;
- In the initial phase, start with simple test cases instead of designing a complex automation framework upfront. Don’t forget to conduct smoke tests.
- Run tests using remote machines from the very start.
- As a part of CI/CD processes, ensure you create a well-optimized test plan and run tests in parallel.
- Finally, configure automation testing capabilities to measure test results daily.
7. Performance Monitoring
Application performance monitoring is the last step required to convert a firm's traditional approach to DevOps. In turn, DevOps teams can offer transparency about various performance issues. Monitoring user experience, monitoring application servers, and other processes can reveal these issues more efficiently. Using tools like Nagios and Prometheus to monitor application performance allows the team to identify, detect, and prioritize defects before the user even notices them.
Top Benefits of DevOps Implementation
Here are some of the top benefits of using DevOps for your software development, deployment, and testing process, including but not limited to;
Improve Productivity and Efficiency
DevOps techniques combine both the development and operational teams to work together and achieve something great together. The main goal of DevOps is to reduce repetitive and time-consuming processes while faster the overall software development cycle more efficiently.
Enhanced Collaboration
Thanks to the DevOps approach, it is now easier to communicate and collaborate between the operations and development teams in a centralized way. Hence, the communication barrier is no longer a problem with DevOps, which makes the entire software journey easier and more remarkable.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
DevOps development methodology is one of the most popular approaches for building quality and scalable software products that drive huge customer attention while reducing the release time. Having a well-planned DevOps Implementation guarantees significant improvements to satisfy the customer needs more efficiently.
Faster Time-To-Market
The DevOps implementation is the perfect choice for organizations that want to automate and streamline software testing while eliminating manual tasks more efficiently. As a result, you will be able to deliver a product with a quicker time to market.
Conclusion
Almost half of organizations are only just starting to implement DevOps, practicing it for less than three years, even if it is cliche to say every business should implement DevOps now to stay competitive. Implementing a DevOps roadmap can help streamline software development and operation teams while releasing the product with a faster time-to-market. Following DevOps principles and the best practices like CI/CD, IaC, testing automation, and app monitoring can help organizations transform their business processes more efficiently.
In addition to this, outsourcing DevOps software development services can help you scale up your business, reduce operational expenses, and customize software solutions tailored to your unique business needs.