DevOps Distilled: 4 Tips for Streamlined Configuration

DevOps magic happens when art and science blend to create tools and workflows that meet your needs and resonate with the people who use them. What’s the secret? Understanding the subtleties of your system, fearlessly embracing complexity, and striving for that elusive balance of creativity and efficiency to lay the foundation for growth. 

Proper DevOps should create a culture of collaboration that unites your development and operations teams on the same platform, so you can ship faster without breaking anything. But it’s not just about Agile methodologies; it’s about going beyond, reclaiming your time, managing in-flight work, and shifting the entire CI/CD process left. 

For those reasons, one size of DevOps configuration does not fit everyone. 

Code, Collaborate, Conquer: DevOps Implementation is Your Path to Productivity 

1. More than just tickets and workflows, DevOps implementation ensures that your tools make sense together and properly connect. Tool sprawl can silently undermine daily productivity and collaboration. When teams use disparate tools along the CI/CD pipeline, one of the biggest challenges is to get a holistic view of progress across the entire pipeline. Since information is scattered, this creates challenges regarding decision-making and proper prioritization. Make sure you look for an ecosystem that can bring it all together and play nicely. 
2. Intelligent infrastructure configuration is another cornerstone of successful DevOps. By automating routine tasks and minimizing manual intervention, teams can free up valuable time to focus on strategic initiatives and activities that matter to the bottom line. Have you encountered incidents with features in production? For example, a feature might perform flawlessly in testing and staging environments but caused unexpected issues upon deployment to production. This scenario is quite common So, why does it happen and how could it have been prevented? Embracing infrastructure as code first. Start right so that it runs right. Enjoy smoother operations and keep issues at bay by setting a sturdy foundation to build on. 
3. Security and compliance are non-negotiable in today’s post-pandemic digital landscape. Proper DevSecOps practices can help organizations stay compliant with all industry standards and regulations without adding unnecessary frustration or admin work to their workflows. The Log4j vulnerability that surfaced in Dec 2021 was a sobering reminder of why it’s important to quickly address vulnerabilities throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Practices such as threat modeling during the product hypothesis stage, static and dynamic code scanning, using SBOMs during development, and applying threat intelligence on live systems are now essential, not optional. Unsure if you need help? The question to consider is if you and your team feel security practices might fall below a safe threshold in certain stages of your DevOps life cycle. Ask your staff, they’re in the system every day and would be the first to point out possible vulnerabilities. You can always reach out to Trundl for help if you aren’t sure where to start, of course.  
4. Lastly, data-driven decision-making is essential for continuous improvement and keeping tabs on KPIs that matter. What does that mean for you? Measure everything. If you don’t see it, you’re unlikely to pay attention to it and certainly won’t act on it. Injecting measurements adds context to the right places which provides a powerful line of sight and trends that can help better business decisions or avert production outages. These could be your system performance metrics, business KPIs, team health etc. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. 

DevOps is about more than just tools and workflows. It's about creating a collaborative culture, automating the boring stuff, making sure security and compliance are Fort Knox, and using data to keep improving. When you get these things right, you build a resilient and efficient DevOps environment that helps your organization grow and succeed. So, start right, measure everything, and remember: you can always tweak and improve as you go.   The goal is to work smarter, not harder, and we hope these tips can help you do just that. Here's to smoother operations and more productive days ahead! 

What are your top DevOps tips? Tell us in the comments.👇