14 DevOps Best Practices and Methods You Should Know

William Imoh · Improve this Guide

DevOps is a proven practice and set of standards that has helped small to large enterprises streamline their software development process and IT operations. It has helped break down silos and deliver more reliable and high-quality software. Despite the benefits it brings, its implementation can be difficult. This is because you need to know the process, the tools to use, and a shift in operational culture, which can be challenging.

Although every organization approaches these challenges in slightly different ways, there are best practices that you can follow to achieve successful implementation.

In this guide, you’ll learn key DevOps best practices to improve your workflow, and common DevOps anti-patterns to avoid when adopting these practices.

TL;DR: 14 DevOps key best practices you should know are:

1. Embrace a culture of collaboration and communication.
2. Continuously seek feedback.
3. Adopt continuous integration.
4. Practice continuous delivery.
5. Embrace Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
6. Adopt microservices architecture.
7. Use version control for everything.
8. Practice continuous monitoring and observability.
9. Adopt configuration management.
10. Practice DevSecOps.
11. Choose the right DevOps tools.
12. Balance quality and speed.
13. Use feature flag to manage features.
14. Adopt agile project management.

DevOps key best practices

Here are 14 key best practices and methods for implementing DevOps:

1. Embrace a culture of collaboration and communication

Collaboration and communication are central to the success of DevOps lifecycle. You need to encourage your team to continuously take ownership of their tasks and communicate (verbal and written) effectively between the development teams, operations teams, quality assurance teams, and other related stakeholders.

View mistakes and failures as learning opportunities rather than assigning blame. You and your team should hold postmortems to identify the root causes of incidents and develop strategies to prevent future occurrences.

2. Continuously seek feedback

Continuously engage your users, stakeholders, and team members to get feedback on their overall experience of the application. This feedback helps resolve issues, shape your application release cycle, and guarantee you’re building with users in mind. As noted in the latest State of DevOps Report, “Teams that focus on the user experience have 40% higher organizational performance than t**hose that don’t.”

Internally, your team can also benefit from continuous feedback during code reviews. By involving stakeholders in analyzing code quality, identifying issues, and suggesting improvements, you can create a culture of constant improvement.

3. Adopt continuous integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice in which developers regularly commit their code changes into a shared repository, which might happen multiple times a day. The goal of CI is to provide feedback quickly to developers so that they can identify and fix defects early in the development lifecycle.

The CI process involves:

• Automated builds: When you commit a code into a shared repository, it triggers an automatic build to verify that the code integrates well with the existing project.
• Automated testing: After the build is successful, automated tests are run to validate that the changes committed don’t break the application.

To support your application in following the CI process and delivering the best value, you need to:

• Commit small and incremental changes to the shared repository often.
• Automate the build process so every commit results in a reliable and repeated build.
• Set up a test to run with every commit to catch any issues as soon as they are introduced.
• Fix broken builds immediately.
• Use a version control system like Git to manage deployment, branches, and track commits.
• Document how the CI process works and how to resolve common issues like broken builds. This will help your team work faster and onboard new members easily.

4. Practice continuous delivery

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software engineering practice where code changes are automatically prepared for release to production. It extends the CI process by ensuring that the codebase that has been added, tested, and passed is ready for release into the staging or production environment.

The goal of CD is to automate the release pipeline so that new features, bug fixes, and improvements can be deployed to production at any time without manual intervention.

To implement CD effectively into your DevOps processes, you need to:

• Automate the entire deployment pipeline (from testing to deployment) to minimize manual error, reduce deployment time, and maintain consistency across environments.
• Use Git as a source of truth for development and infrastructure management.
• Track the health of your application by monitoring performance, errors, and logging.
• Set up your pipeline so it can revert to previous working deployments in case of critical error.
• Use feature flags to roll out features gradually into production.
• Integrate security measures into your pipeline to scan and check for vulnerabilities.

5. Embrace Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a DevOps practice that uses machine-readable definition files to manage and provision computing infrastructure rather than physical hardware configuration or direct interaction with configuration tools. It involves using code (JSON, XML, or domain-specific languages) to specify and configure providers, resources, and more.

IaC aims to eliminate manual workflow in provisioning resources, making deployment faster and less prone to human errors. To implement IaC effectively into your DevOps processes, you need to:

• Use Git to collaborate, track changes over time, and easily roll back to previous changes over version if necessary.
• Break down your infrastructure code into reusable components. This makes it easy to manage and reuse across multiple projects.
• Write unit tests, integration tests, and other security-related tests to validate that IaC works as designed.
• Use environment variables to manage sensitive values like API ket, resource IDs, and more.
• Use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) to integrate IaC into your pipeline to automatically provision or update infrastructure.

The recently concluded State of DevOps Report also highlights the importance of IaC for its elasticity, on-demand resource provisioning, and flexibility. These advantages have contributed to a 30% higher organizational performance compared to those not utilizing IaC.

6. Adopt microservices architecture

Microservice architecture involves breaking down your application into small, independent, and deployable services. Each service is responsible for a specific functionality and can be independently developed, tested, and deployed. This architecture promotes scalability, fault isolation, and rapid innovation, which are essential to the DevOps environment.

To implement microservice architecture effectively into your DevOps processes, you need to:

• Design your microservice to have retries, circuit breakers, and fallback mechanisms to handle failure gracefully.
• Build your microservice to manage its database or data source to avoid tight coupling.
• Use containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes to manage deployment.
• Implement CI/CD pipeline to enable reliable and consistent updates to individual services.
• Use message brokers like Kafka and RabbitMQ to communicate between services and reduce dependencies.

In my opinion, a microservice architecture is only suitable for mature systems with multiple intertwined parts built for scale rather than a relatively small software that could be run better as a mon

7. Use version control for everything

Version control is a system that records changes to files over time. It lets you track, manage, and collaborate on code efficiently. To use Git effectively in your DevOps processes, you need to:

• Use effective branching strategies like feature branching and Git flow to manage the development process.
• Promote frequent commits with descriptive commit messages.
• Use pull requests (PRs) to facilitate code review and collaboration between the development and operations teams.
• Keep your repositories clean of generated files like binaries, logs, or dependencies.
• Use tag releases to mark important milestones, e.g., v1.0.2.
• Use descriptive branch names. This will help you and your team understand the purpose of each branch.

8. Practice continuous monitoring and observability

Monitoring involves collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from your system in real-time to detect issues like outages, bottlenecks, or resource exhaustion. On the other hand, Observability is about understanding what is happening inside the system by analyzing data like logs, metrics, and traces. To take advantage of monitoring and observability in your DevOps processes, you need to:

• Define Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and other performance-related metrics to clarify performance and ensure proper monitoring coverage.
• Monitor key metrics like uptime, error rates, latency, and CPU usage.
• Use tools like Grafana and Kibana to create real-time visual dashboards that can give you insights on how your application is performing.
• Collect all your internal data (logs, metrics, and traces) in a centralized location for easy access and analysis.

9. Adopt configuration management

Configuration management is the process of systematically handling changes to a system’s configuration to ensure consistency and integrity. It involves defining and maintaining settings, dependencies, and states of servers, network devices, applications, and databases. The goal is to make sure infrastructure is configured correctly, and changes are managed effectively to avoid errors and downtime.

To take advantage of configuration management in your DevOps processes, you need to:

• Automate the entire configuration process, from setting up applications and services to deployment of servers.
• Use Git to manage and store your configurations centrally. This makes it easy to track changes, collaborate, and roll back if needed.
• Write modular configuration files that can be reused across different environments.
• Document all your configurations so that your team members can understand.

10. Practice DevSecOps

DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It’s an extension of DevOps that promotes the integration of security practices into every phase of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). In the traditional development process, security is often handled by a separate team at the end of the process. In this case, when vulnerabilities are discovered, it slows down the deployment and increases the cost of fixing issues.

To prevent such incidents in your DevOps processes, integrate security practices and tools into all stages of your SDLC to avoid downtime and fix vulnerabilities early.

11. Choose the right DevOps tools

Selecting the right DevOps tools can significantly impact the success of your DevOps processes. The ecosystem is constantly changing, and you’ll get varying opinions on tools to use; it’s important to carefully evaluate options. Consider your team’s strengths, the learning curve, and your organization’s goal before adopting any tool for your DevOps pipeline.

Below are some tools you should consider when implementing DevOps processes:

• CI/CD tools: Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Azure Pipeline, and GitHub Actions help automate the integration and deployment of code changes.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools: Tools like Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, Chef, AWS CloudFormation, and Vagrant help automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure.
• Containerization and orchestration tools: Tools like Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker Swarm, and Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) help manage and orchestrate containers at scale.
• Monitoring and logging tools: Tools like Prometheus, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), Datadog, Splunk, and Grafana help track system performance, logging, and alerting.
• Configuration management tools: Tools like Chef, Puppet, CFEngine, SaltStack, and Ansible help ensure system configurations remain consistent across environments.
• Security and compliance tools: Tools like HashiCorp Vault, OWASP ZAP, Snyk, SonarQube, and Aqua Security help enforce security policies, perform scans, and conduct compliance checks.
• Collaboration and communication tools: Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Jira, and Confluence help facilitate communication and collaboration between teams.

12. Balance quality and speed

A key promise of DevOps is that it delivers software quickly. While it’s tempting to speed up development processes, this often leads to reduced quality and potential security vulnerabilities. The pressure is further heightened because a lot of metrics in DevOps are based on how fast your system is, making it even more tempting to prioritize fast delivery over quality.

To avoid these pitfalls, strike a balance between quality and speed by taking the time to test the application before release. Below are some strategies to help maintain this balance:

• Implement continuous testing into your CI/CD pipeline to catch bugs early.
• Encourage a culture of quality that makes developers take full ownership of their code.
• Define quality checkpoints like code reviews, tests, and coding standards that must be passed before moving to production.

13. Use feature flags to manage features

Feature flags (also known as Feature Toggles) are powerful tools that let you enable or disable specific features in an application without deploying new code. They provide fine-grain control over the parts of an application that are visible and active at any time.

You can use a feature flag in your DevOps processes to:

• Perform gradual feature rollout.
• Safely deploy features and rollback if needed.
• Perform A/B testing

14. Adopt agile project management

Agile software development methodologies like Scrum and Kanban are well-suited to the iterative nature of DevOps. Agile uses a continuous approach to develop software rather than the linear waterfall model.

By embracing agile project management, you manage your projects better by breaking them down into smaller and manageable chunks rather than dealing with them in large chunks that are prone to error.

DevOps anti-patterns to avoid

While DevOps has become the go-to approach for delivering scalable and robust applications, it has also introduced certain anti-patterns that can prevent you from fully reaping its benefits. These anti-patterns can lead to inefficiencies, limit collaboration, and result in poor outcomes. Let’s look at some common anti-patterns you should avoid:

Automating everything without understanding Because automation is at the center of DevOps, teams often fall into the trap of automating every process without understanding the underlying workflow or business logic. This can lead to incorrect implementation, inefficient processes, complexities, and sometimes bugs.

Before you automate a process, make sure you understand the underlying workflow. Start with critical processes that provide the most value, and regularly review automated processes to confirm they are providing value.

DevOps as a one-time project When most teams build or extend a project, timelines are usually attached. They have start and end dates for product design, engineering, DevOps, QA, and more, which may cause them to view DevOps as a short-term project. This prevents teams from realizing the long-term benefits and leads to a lack of continuous improvement.

You need to adopt DevOps as a continuous practice by regularly evaluating processes and workflow and encouraging your team to experiment.

Not having a proper monitoring and feedback loop Failing to implement adequate monitoring and feedback mechanisms to track application performance, reliability, and user experience makes it difficult for the DevOps team to detect issues in real-time. This can lead to longer recovery time when there’s an issue, and the team may miss opportunities to learn and improve the system.

To address this, you need to implement end-to-end monitoring and observability tools to gain insight into the system’s health. Additionally, a clear feedback loop should be established so that responsible teams are notified promptly when issues are detected.

Siloed DevOps team A common practice in most organizations is to separate the DevOps Team from other teams and task them with all DevOps activities. This separation defeats the core principle of DevOps: cross-functional collaboration and shared ownership. It isolates the DevOps team from others, leading to communication gaps and a lack of ownership.

To address this, promote a DevOps culture of shared responsibility where DevOps practices are adopted across all teams.

Over-reliance on tools Adopting the latest and trendiest DevOps tool doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes, they even increase the problems if not used correctly. DevOps is about processes, people, and tools.

To address this, follow the right processes: ensure effective team collaboration, improve workflows and align with the teams before choosing tools.

Too many feature flags While feature flags are powerful, too many can lead to technical debt, making the codebase messy, cluttered, and difficult to maintain.

To address this, use feature flags as needed and regularly clean up flags that are no longer needed.

Overcomplicating the CI/CD pipeline When pipelines are overly complicated with multi-step CI/CD, stages, and checks, it leads to slow deployments. This can slow down the releases, become a bottleneck, and make troubleshooting difficult.

You can address this by keeping the pipeline simple and focusing on key steps like build, test, and deploy. Then, add stages only when needed.

Not defining what success looks like Failing to define and track meaningful metrics can make it difficult to measure the success or failure of DevOps practices. Without clear metrics, the team may not know if they are improving, and the team leads may struggle to justify the investment in DevOps to management.

You can address this by defining a key performance index (KPI) that aligns with your business goal, such as deployment frequency, change lead time, and mean time to recovery (MTTR).

Key takeaway

DevOps best practices are essential for improving your software development and operations processes. These practices help improve your workflows, enhance collaboration, manage resources better, and ensure the delivery of high-quality software.

Additionally, you need to be aware of anti-patterns and pitfalls that can hinder the success of your DevOps implementation by avoiding common patterns like creating silos or overcomplicating your pipelines.

Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the DevOps ecosystem by following the DevOps roadmap.