DevOps Best Practices in Cloud: Automation, Monitoring, & Security

DevOps is among the top trending terms in the application development domain today. It represents the set of best practices, processes, technologies, tools, and people working towards a common goal of delivering quality and customer-oriented solutions in an agile manner – as one distributed unit.

  To say it precisely – DevOps is a culture that ensures high productivity for your development as well as Operations teams and continuous delivery for your applications. And as remote collaboration and distributed computing are essential to achieve DevOps goals, Cloud makes an inseparable part of the methodology’s deployment.

  Decided to embrace DevOps best practices for your Cloud environment? A brilliant idea, indeed.

  81% of IT decision-makers have accepted that they could unlock multiplied business value after adopting this methodology.

  Let us walk you through the automation, monitoring, and security best practices that will guide you in the DevOps journey.

DevOps in Automation - Best Practices and Tips

  Agility and continuity are among the top principles of DevOps. If everything is done manually by your teams, adhering to these principles is next to impossible. Hence, automation.

  To ensure the quality and standardized adoption of automation, you must remember a few rules:

  Identify what can be automated: Your organization must think of all repetitive tasks that can be automated using tools. Automation should, and must, not affect the quality of that process/operation adversely.

Repeat the first point: As your infrastructure will have new processes every few weeks or so, repeating the process of identifying the automation opportunities is suggested.

Go for a unified toolbox: Your adopted DevOps automation tools should be able to work together and allow you to draw correlations in data/processes. It will help you accelerate your processes and launch new app releases faster.

Communicate and train: If your DevOps pipeline has a list of tools that are known for a few employees but not for others, it will hinder the productivity of your team. The same goes for the project progress details. So, always keep your team updated about the changes and train them to use tools related to their domain.

You can try DevOps services while aiming to automate. Additionally, tools from the following categories will also be beneficial -

• Version management tools

• Design and development automation systems

• GitOps tools for automated software delivery and deployment

• Tools to automate processes related to product planning and operations

• Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) tools

• Threat detection and prevention tools

• Tools that can automate app performance monitoring and testing

• Cloud health monitoring solutions

  In case you are confused about how to go about automation as per your business needs, you may opt for the DevOps consulting services. With experts to assist, you will have more clarity on where automation can improve your DevOps.

DevOps in Monitoring - Best Practices and Tips

Cloud and application monitoring save organizations from falling into the trap of big cyber attackers and risks. It helps improve speed, performance, flexibility, scalability, and decision-making tools. To leverage its benefits, these tips will be very useful for you:

Data Collection is a must: It goes without saying, doesn’t it? Your organization must automatedly and manually collect all the data that should be collected. Most importantly, optimize the data you are gathering, decide upon when this data should retire, and think about what good can be achieved with the collected data.

Do not skip Data Correlation and Trend Identification: Your Cloud infrastructure monitoring tool will have data coming from different processes, at different frequencies, and in different formats. It's up to your correlation tools and experts to understand this data and draw conclusions from the same. Meanwhile, ponder what 'important' data is missing from your metrics and how to find it out.

Predict, Automate, and Act: Use the knowledge gained through the above 2 practices to create analytics reports, predict trends, make decisions, automate operations, and take actions.

DevOps in Security - Best Practices and Tips

Considering security as your priority is essential for DevOps as it utilizes a cloud-native or Cloud-enabled development model. Here’s how to ensure high security for your applications:

Go for DevSecOps Model: Implementing this development approach simply means that your DevOps process should perform security testing, do vulnerability management, and standardize the application after every phase of development/update.

Deploy security tools and protocols for your internal/external users: Encryption, multi-factor authentication, identity & access management, secrets management, and network segmentation are a few approaches to name in the row. Monitor, audit, and control each of these security components to ensure their effectiveness and consistency.

Policy enforcement and compliance: Your DevOps environment must have a holistic security policy and a defined set of compliances as per the industry. Defining your conditions clearly and keeping things transparent for your team(s) ensure that your application meets certain security and development standards.

Configuration management: Server misconfiguration can result in information leaks, resource wastage, and security threats. So, configuration monitoring, problem identification, and quick remediation are more than essential.

Deploy a discovery mechanism: Your development pipeline and Cloud infrastructure should have a way to authorize, validate, and disapprove tools, users, processes, and devices from remote.

5 Common DevOps Best Practices and Tips for the Cloud

Partner with the right Cloud Provider for your business/applications. Look at the offered features, pricing, integrations, and abilities before deciding.

Hire DevOps Managed Services providers to free your Development and Operations teams from the burden of ‘embracing DevOps.’ It will allow you to enable a DevOps-optimized process flow for your team quickly and without fail.

Only go for people with proven expertise. Hire experts who are well-acquainted with your Cloud environment (e.g., MS Azure, AWS, GCP, hybrid, multi-cloud, or so on).

Optimize your Cloud before adopting DevOps. Keeping only the essential apps and instances will let your development and operations team focus on crucial tasks.

Document every single change made in your product so that all teams can understand, troubleshoot, and improve the application in the shortest possible time.

Looking for AWS DevOps services or wish to hire a reliable Azure DevOps services provider?   Opsio’s certified experts are readily available, offering business-centric DevOps services.