Best of 2021 – 6 Signs You’re Doing DevOps Correctly

As we close out 2021, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the twenty-first in our series of the Best of 2021.

A lot of organizations claim to be DevOps-focused because they use specific tools and loosely follow certain practices. But to really be a DevOps-centric organization, there are specific DevOps principles and processes that ensure your organization is as optimized and automated as possible. To ensure that you’re not just using the DevOps title without following the underlying principles as an organization, here are six signs you’re actually doing it right.

Deployment Is Fully Automated

Having deployment completely automated from start to finish is one of the more apparent signs that you’re following the DevOps principles correctly. Automated deployment is a huge time saver, especially when things go wrong and you need to revert to a previous build version quickly. Manual deployments can lead to problems often caused by human error. Having a strong focus on automating processes is a core belief DevOps-centric organizations should hold dearly. Automation increases an organization’s efficiency and reduces errors.

You Have Frequent and Rapid Release Cycles

As soon as software is ready to go, it should be deployed and delivered to the customers. We live in a world where competitors are building better software daily. It’s to an organization’s benefit that new features and bug fixes are continuously deployed to stay ahead of the competition. DevOps is all about continuous delivery, so having developers produce new code and quickly release it into production is one of DevOps’ core features.

You’re Using The Right Tools and Platforms

The tools you use to deploy features and fixes should make building applications easy and testing straightforward. You should generally be able to build, test and deploy to production with no hiccups along the way. If you’re spending a lot of time fixing any issues that occur, then you might not have the right tools or processes in place. Fortunately, today there are extensive continuous integration software options that can adapt to any current existing infrastructure. Although tools are an essential piece of DevOps, it’s important to remember that while tools make DevOps possible, it’s the practices that truly make the changes happen.

You Have a Continuous Feedback Loop

Nothing is perfect in its first iteration, and errors are bound to occur along the way. You must have a continuous feedback loop system to detect when and where things go wrong. Having software tools that monitor processes and quickly inform you when errors occur will make fixing issues that pop up easier and faster.

If you have a system set up to identify issues, fix them and improve upon them, you’re doing DevOps correctly. If you run into problems and simply fix them without taking the time to analyze why they occurred or how to prevent them from appearing again, you might want to consider making some changes.

Development and Operations Groups Work Together

Communication between development, testing and IT operations groups is vital for DevOps success. Cooperation between these different groups ensures that the pipeline will run smoothly. Any problems that do occur will be faster to fix when developers and IT operations personnel can easily coordinate with one another.

Goals and Objectives Are Clearly Established

While communication between different teams is essential, having clearly defined goals and objectives that everyone is striving toward is just as important. Ultimately, all the teams have the same goal: making the organization more efficient; however, the individual practices they follow to make that happen might differ. Team members should be aware of precise requirements that need to be met for a goal to be reached, instead of making assumptions or leaving it to chance.