DevOps principles: Benefits and best practices for a strong strategy

DevOps is variously referred to as a methodology, a philosophy, a culture, a set of tools, and a platform. At its core, DevOps fundamentals center on adopting shared practices and DevOps tools, culture, and practices, to continuously deliver value to customers more quickly and reliably. A successful DevOps approach relies on continuous integration, automation, and a streamlined DevOps pipeline to accelerate delivery while ensuring stability.

This union creates an environment with a high degree of automation and integration between developers and IT teams that previously have traditionally worked in silos. It encourages communication and collaboration across teams and over the lifecycle of applications.

DevOps begins with application planning and design and seeks to improve code quality and confidence, achieve faster responsiveness and faster time to market, and improve customer value. As teams learn to work together, they develop trust and a cross-functional understanding that encourages better alignment of development with business requirements.

How does DevOps work?

DevOps originated from Agile software development and was created in part to deliver on the software velocity that Agile promised. It took root because organizations were experiencing slower releases, limitations due to siloed teams, and software that didn’t meet expectations or quality, despite the Agile goal that iterative development would lead to faster releases. DevOps fundamentals emerged to address these challenges through a stronger focus on automation, collaboration, and shared ownership. Development methodologies contributing to and working with DevOps include Kanban, Scrum, Lean, SAFe, and Extreme Programming.

DevOps represents a continuous process loop. The key steps along this process are planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, monitoring, and synthesizing feedback into planning, starting the loop over again. This loop is highly dependent on collaboration and communication, uses CI/CD and automation to speed the process, and conveys a sense of responsibility and self-service to the participants. By focusing on eliminating software development bottlenecks, DevOps helps development organizations reach a release cadence that keeps up with customer expectations.

DevOps infinity loop.

The focus on communications breaks down silos, while iterative software development means that releases are smaller and easier to roll back if an issue arises. Through collaboration, the developer and operations cultures are jointly responsible for development testing in environments that satisfy them both. This reduces finger-pointing and invests both parties in the success of software releases. DevOps organizations use blameless postmortem investigations to uncover issues resulting from feedback and then monitor and improve.

Successful organizations adopting a DevOps culture that makes everyone responsible are able to translate market needs into software features faster, providing a competitive advantage.

What are the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer?

DevOps engineers are essential to creating a high-performing DevOps culture. Their role combines technical expertise with cross-functional collaboration to empower teams in delivering software better and faster, acting as a bridge between code and deployment.

DevOps roles and responsibilities often include:

• Implementing and managing DevOps tools
• Collaborating with developers and IT teams
• Maintaining and improving deployment pipelines
• Monitoring app performance and the reliability of the system
• Driving a culture of continuous improvement
• Ensure that security and compliance requirements across environments are met

The right DevOps tools and practices not only streamline processes, but they also enable business innovation at scale.

Benefits of DevOps

Adopting a DevOps approach benefits your business in several ways, including:

• Better communication and improved collaboration between IT and development groups; breaking down of silos to create better understanding and cross-functional collaboration
• A more efficient software development and deployment process across the entire application lifecycle, from planning to development, builds, validation, and deployment
• Increased responsibility and ownership leading to better software development quality and broader roles and skill sets
• Rapid improvement in software driven by feedback loops, a faster software release cadence, and reduced time to market for software
• Less manual work, thanks to the automation of repetitive tasks, such as testing, deployment, and monitoring
• Better quality software and stronger confidence among team members
• Higher customer satisfaction fueled by the speed of releases, improved code quality, and less downtime

DevOps best practices

There are several best practices organizations can adopt to implement a DevOps framework. To highlight some of the most common:

• Continuous integration: Focuses on creating a fast feedback loop regarding developer changes. Changes produced in small batches are merged into the trunk, and each commit triggers a build of the software and a series of automated tests that provide feedback in a few minutes. If something is broken, teams swarm to fix it as soon as possible. The goal is to have a stable build from which everyone can develop. To have this, teams need to have version control of app code and configurations, and work in trunk-based development.
• Continuous delivery: Works towards having an always-deployable state throughout the software lifecycle, with small batches and continuous integration, ensuring teams are more agile in delivering changes to production and reducing the risk in doing so. To do so, teams also need to invest in test automation, shift-left on security, and a loosely coupled architecture.
• Loosely coupled architecture: Architecture is also an important predictor for achieving continuous delivery. It should be designed to enable teams to test, deploy, and change systems autonomously, thus promoting that both the architecture and teams are loosely coupled.
• Monitoring and observability: A comprehensive monitoring and observability solution positively contributes to continuous delivery and directly impacts the time to restore service measure. However, installing a tool is not enough to achieve the objectives. Empowering all developers to be proficient with monitoring helps develop a culture of data-driven decision-making and improves overall system debuggability, reducing outages.

DevOps vs. DevSecOps: What is the difference?

DevOps and development security operations (DevSecOps) share similar principles. However, the key difference is in their focus areas within the software development lifecycle:

• DevOps focuses on collaboration and integration between development and operations teams to streamline processes and deliver software more efficiently.
• DevSecOps integrates security practices and tools into the DevOps workflow, ensuring that security is built into the process from start to finish.
  As software becomes more complex and development cycles accelerate, security is a must-have in every stage to help reduce vulnerabilities and cut costs, making security a shared responsibility across development, security, and operations teams.

Explore the importance of integrating security into DevOps

Cloud DevOps for scalable software delivery

As companies continue moving their applications to the cloud and adopting cloud-native strategies, the benefits of building, testing, and deploying software in the cloud go beyond cost savings. By transitioning to a continuous stream of microservices in containerized environments, development teams can move away from the limitations of monolithic software architectures.

This approach makes them not only more flexible but also more resilient. The decentralized nature of microservices means one area of failure should not affect an entire application and doesn’t bring down the entire system. The scaling up of resources as needed through containers and Kubernetes frees developers and IT staff from rote work so they can focus on delivering higher-value software innovation, like new features.

Cloud DevOps is a key enabler in building modern, scalable applications, empowering businesses to adapt quickly.

Low-code DevOps: From development to deployment

With built-in automation capabilities, lifecycle management, and continuous delivery, low-code platforms are great tools to extend the gains of both Agile and DevOps.

The OutSystems low-code development platform offers out-of-the-box DevOps automation tools for different phases of the software delivery cycle, supporting the entire lifecycle of an application from development to deployment. With on-click deployment, automated governance, and AI-powered lifecycle management, our platform provides development teams with the right tools to deliver high-quality apps.

But it also gives you the flexibility to integrate with your existing toolchain. This way, companies benefit from continuous delivery that ultimately fosters productive collaboration between the business and IT.

You can learn more about low-code DevOps in our on-demand Tech Talk on the topic or visit the platform page dedicated to OutSystems DevOps capabilities.

DevOps frequently asked questions