23 DevOps Best Practices You Should Know [2024]

As DevOps evolves, organizations face challenges like complex deployments, cross-team data transfer issues, and maintaining production visibility. To address these, it’s crucial to streamline delivery processes, enhance collaboration, and boost operational resilience.

According to a research report, the DevOps market is set to reach $25.5 billion by 2028, underscoring the importance of adopting best practices that align with business goals and technological needs. Embracing DevOps best practices helps organizations improve customer satisfaction, accelerate time-to-market, and optimize operational efficiency.

Why Is DevOps Important?

DevOps is a cultural philosophy and a set of techniques that helps close the gap between the software development teams and IT operations teams. It is a strategy that encourages teamwork, automation, and shared accountability for providing consumers with value in a timely and dependable manner rather than being just a bookish methodology or a tool.

It essentially recognizes two essential components:

• Individuals and Traditions: It requires breaking down silos and adopting a culture of collaboration, shared accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Value Transfer: It aims to deliver consistent value to clients while allowing enterprises to quickly adapt and maintain quality in a dynamic environment.

DevOps achieves its core objectives through automated deployment, continuous monitoring, and feedback loops supported by Agile methodologies. While technologies and tools are crucial for implementing DevOps, the true strength lies in the processes and cultural changes that foster cooperation, openness, and shared accountability in delivering value to consumers.

With its core components, DevOps offers several benefits, including:

• Faster Software Delivery: Reduces time from idea to production. Example: Amazon deploys updates every 11.6 seconds.
• Improved Collaboration and Communication: Enhances real-time updates and issue resolution, leading to a 60% decrease in support case time and a 45% boost in productivity.
• Increased Automation: Reduces manual labor and errors in development, testing, and deployment. Tools like LambdaTest improve cross-browser testing efficiency.
• Enhanced Security and Compliance: Integrates security checks early, reducing breaches and ensuring compliance with industry standards.
• Improved Quality and Reliability: Automated testing, CI, and CD improve product quality, reliability, and error recovery.
• Better Scalability and Cost Efficiency: Uses cloud infrastructure and containerization to scale applications and optimize costs.

As you now have a basic understanding of DevOps and its benefits, let’s proceed to explore various DevOps best practices that will help you effectively implement these principles in your organization.

23 DevOps Best Practices

DevOps best practices streamline collaboration between development and operations teams, ensuring faster and more efficient software delivery. By adopting these practices, organizations can enhance automation, improve reliability, and continuously integrate changes to meet business goals.

Here are some key DevOps best practices that teams should follow to work effectively and deliver software more efficiently.

Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

One effective DevOps best practice is adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which allows enterprises to manage and deploy infrastructure using code rather than manual setup. This approach enhances collaboration, simplifies deployment processes, and ensures consistent environments throughout the software delivery life cycle (SDLC). According to the Puppet survey, organizations using IaC deploy code 30 times more frequently than those that do not.

Popular IaC Tools:

• Microsoft Bicep: An open-source DSL for Azure that simplifies creating and deploying resources compared to JSON-based ARM templates.
• Other Tools: Terraform and Pulumi offer similar capabilities for managing infrastructure.

Using IaC tools helps organizations embrace a more agile and DevOps-oriented approach, enabling developers to manage resources programmatically and ensuring consistency and version control from development to delivery.

Adopt Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are essential DevOps best practices for improving software delivery.

• Continuous Integration (CI): Automatically builds and tests code changes as they are merged into a shared repository. Automation testing in CI helps catch issues early.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): Automates the entire delivery process, including staging and production. CD tools like Spinnaker manage automated deployments.

CI/CD practices enhance problem detection, speed up updates, and increase productivity by automating tasks. CI/CD tools like Jenkins and GitLab CI handle the integration and testing phase, while CD tools like Spinnaker manage the deployment process.

To enhance your CI/CD process, you can prefer using a cloud-based platform like LambdaTest that offers features like HyperExecute, an AI-driven test orchestration platform built to accelerate testing speed and efficiency. It goes beyond traditional cloud-based testing by automating and optimizing the testing process.

By integrating HyperExecute into your CI/CD pipeline, you can execute tests faster, get quicker feedback on code changes, run large test suites in parallel, and reduce infrastructure costs through optimized resource usage. This ensures stable, reliable tests across environments, significantly improving software quality.

With HyperExecute, your CI/CD pipeline becomes more efficient and scalable, enabling faster, higher-quality software delivery.

Embrace Shift-Left Testing

Moving testing to earlier phases of development helps catch defects early. By integrating automated testing with AI-driven tools like Mabl or Functionize, companies can identify and fix issues sooner, improving code quality and reducing time to market.

Utilize Containerization

Gartner expects up to 15% of enterprise applications to run in container environments by 2024. Leverage containerization tools like Docker or Podman to ensure consistency across development, testing, and production environments, enhancing scalability and resource efficiency.

Orchestrate With Kubernetes

Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, providing uniform and repeatable environments. It supports rolling upgrades, automatic rollbacks, and canary deployments for zero-downtime updates.

For sophisticated container orchestration, teams can use Kubernetes with service mesh technologies like Istio or Linkerd. Implement best practices such as safe secrets management, containerization, IaC scanning, and GitOps to enhance Kubernetes utilization.

Monitor and Log Extensively

Monitoring and logging are vital for maintaining application and infrastructure health. Monitoring tracks performance metrics while logging captures events for troubleshooting. Key practices include setting clear objectives, standardizing logging, automating real-time alerts, and using metrics to proactively identify issues.

Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, or DataDog provide real-time insights, helping teams optimize performance and ensure system reliability.

Adopt Microservices Architecture

Microservices architecture enhances agility, scalability, and reliability by allowing independent scaling and faster updates through service isolation. It enables smaller teams to take full ownership of services, simplifying operations like debugging and upgrades.

However, it requires robust monitoring, testing, and tracing, which are key aspects of DevOps best practices. Organizations should invest in containerization, API management, and automation tools. Best practices include using CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and observability tools. Teams can break down monolithic applications using frameworks like Spring Boot or Quarkus and manage microservices with service meshes like Istio or Linkerd.

Use Configuration Management Tools

Configuration Management (CM) is one of the key aspects of DevOps best practices that ensures consistency and control over system configurations in DevOps. It automates setup, deployment, and updates, fostering collaboration through centralized repositories and enhancing security by enforcing policies.

Using CM tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef allows organizations to automate infrastructure, integrate with CI/CD pipelines, and maintain version control. This helps DevOps teams ensure standardized environments, rapid deployments, and effective collaboration while meeting security and compliance needs.

Implement Security Best Practices (DevSecOps)

Security is one of the key aspects of the DevOps best practices. Integrating security into the CI/CD pipeline with tools like Snyk, Aqua Security, or Checkmarx allows teams to detect vulnerabilities early and ensure compliance with security standards throughout the development process.

Practice Automated Testing in DevOps

Automating tests—such as unit, integration, functional, and performance tests—is a critical practice in DevOps to ensure consistent code quality and reliability. By integrating automated testing frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, or JUnit into your DevOps pipeline, you can achieve faster feedback loops and detect issues early in the development cycle.

This approach not only enhances the robustness of your code but also supports continuous delivery by validating every change before it reaches production. Embracing automated testing within your DevOps practices helps maintain high standards of software quality and reliability throughout the development process.

Leverage Cloud Services

Cloud services enable rapid provisioning, seamless scalability, and automation for efficient application delivery. To align with DevOps best practices, teams can automate pipelines, scale resources, and monitor across the stack using managed services like databases, containers, or serverless computing. Implementing DevOps as a Service (DaaS), integrating security (CloudSecOps), and using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for resource management are essential strategies. For scalable serverless solutions, use AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Run.

Cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest offer testing infrastructure and help implement automation in DevOps, further supporting adherence to DevOps best practices.

Subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube Channel for more video tutorials on QA concepts, DevOps automation, and various testing techniques.

Use Blue-Green Deployments

Blue-green deployments minimize downtime and risk during software releases by maintaining two identical production environments. One environment is live while the other is idle. When a new version is ready, it’s deployed to the idle environment. Once validated, traffic is switched to the new version, leaving the previous version idle.

This approach ensures high availability, quick rollbacks, and smooth transitions. Tools like Spinnaker or Argo Rollouts can automate the process, enhancing efficiency and reliability. Implementing blue-green deployments provides a robust framework for seamless production transitions with minimal service interruptions.

Adopt Feature Toggles

Feature toggles allow teams to control the release of new features by separating feature deployment from code deployment. This enables gradual rollouts and easier rollbacks, reducing risk and improving agility.

Using feature flags, organizations can test new features in production without exposing them to all users. This approach minimizes downtime and enhances user experience by providing a controlled environment for feature testing before full deployment. Integrating feature flags with CI/CD pipelines further streamlines the process, allowing for real-time monitoring and adjustments.

Implement Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering involves intentionally injecting controlled failures into production systems to uncover vulnerabilities and improve system resilience. By testing failure scenarios, teams can identify weaknesses, enhance monitoring, and build confidence in handling unexpected events.

To implement effectively:

• Set clear objectives for testing.
• Start with simple experiments and gradually increase complexity.
• Monitor system behavior and document findings.

Chaos engineering strengthens systems, reduces downtime, and aligns with DevOps principles of continuous improvement. Tools like Gremlin can help execute these experiments to identify vulnerabilities before they impact production.

Embrace Immutable Infrastructure

Immutable infrastructure involves never modifying components like servers after deployment. Instead, create and replace new versions as needed. This approach enhances consistency, simplifies rollbacks, reduces configuration drift, and improves security.

To implement effectively:

• Use Packer for creating identical machine images.
• Define infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Leverage Docker for containerization and Kubernetes for orchestration.
• Automate deployments with CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins.
• Employ configuration management tools like Ansible.

Immutable infrastructure ensures more resilient, scalable, and secure systems, aligning with DevOps best practices for improved stability and recoverability.

Ensure Proper Documentation

Effective documentation is essential for DevOps teams, providing a centralized knowledge base for technical details, processes, and collaboration guidelines. It enhances communication, knowledge sharing, and onboarding.

Key areas to document include infrastructure details, processes, and incident reports.
Best practices:

• Use tools that support easy updates and access.
• Foster a culture that values documentation.
• Ensure consistency in format and location.
• Secure leadership support for documentation efforts.

Maintain thorough and up-to-date documentation using tools like Confluence, Notion, or MkDocs to support efficient operations and onboarding.

Optimize Performance

Performance optimization is crucial for high-quality software and a great user experience. DevOps teams should use real-time performance optimization tools integrated with their CI/CD pipelines. These tools offer features like application-driven resource management, configuration adjustments, and AI-driven optimizations to enhance throughput and reduce infrastructure costs.

Key benefits include:

• Cloud cost savings through improved resource use
• Reduced latency and response times
• Increased throughput

Using APM tools like New Relic or Dynatrace to continuously monitor and optimize application and infrastructure performance aligns with DevOps best practices, supporting goals of fast software delivery, stability, and efficient resource use.

Adopt GitOps

GitOps uses Git as the single source of truth for managing infrastructure and application configurations. Changes in Git trigger CI/CD pipelines to build, test, and reconcile the desired state with the currently deployed state.

Advantages include:

• Version control
• Auditability
• Easier rollbacks
• Automated management

GitOps supports collaboration and consistent environments throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Tools like ArgoCD or Flux can be used to manage infrastructure and applications via Git repositories.

Enable Self-Service Infrastructure

Allowing development teams to manage their environments can speed up deployments and boost productivity.

Tools:

• AWS Service Catalog: Creates and manages catalogs of IT services for developers, ensuring adherence to standards.
• AWS Proton: Helps create and manage Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).
• HashiCorp Terraform Cloud: Defines and provisions infrastructure using a high-level configuration language.

Benefits:

• Reduced Bottlenecks: Faster iterations without relying on central IT.
• Increased Productivity: Developers focus more on coding rather than setup.
• Enhanced Flexibility: Customizable environments to fit project needs.

Use Secrets Management Tools

Use secrets management tools to securely handle sensitive information like API keys, passwords, and certificates. Tools such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Azure Key Vault offer secure, centralized storage and fine-grained access controls, preventing unauthorized access and breaches.

These tools integrate seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, reducing manual errors and enhancing security. Implementing a secrets management solution helps mitigate data breach risks and ensures compliance with industry standards.

Promote Collaboration and Blameless Communication

Creating a culture where collaboration grows and failures are seen as learning opportunities is crucial. Organizations should encourage cross-functional teams to enhance communication.
Tools like Spacelift facilitate this by allowing security and compliance teams to collaborate on workflows and policies. Additionally, fostering open communication between development, operations, and other stakeholders through platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord helps ensure alignment and efficiency.

Continuously Improve

Continuous improvement is essential for DevOps productivity and creativity, and it is one of the core aspects of DevOps best practices. This involves regularly evaluating and refining processes, tools, and practices based on feedback and lessons learned. For example, MyFitnessPal improved its procedures after a data breach in 2017 by enhancing its testing and monitoring systems.

The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle helps teams implement and analyze changes systematically. CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and CircleCI also support continuous improvement by speeding up delivery and improving software quality in alignment with DevOps best practices.

Invest in Training and Development

This is one of the key aspects of DevOps best practices, as it requires teams to stay up-to-date with the evolving DevOps landscape. Teams can utilize online platforms like Coursera, Udemy, or Pluralsight for courses, certifications, and hands-on projects. For instance, Atlassian offers comprehensive training on tools like Bitbucket, Jira, and Bamboo. Additionally, schedule internal workshops, attend conferences, and allocate time for experimentation to foster a culture of continuous learning.

Prioritizing training helps build a skilled DevOps team capable of driving excellent results and supporting business growth.

Conclusion

Adopting DevOps best practices is essential for organizations aiming to enhance collaboration, streamline processes, and maintain operational resilience. By implementing techniques such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and container orchestration, teams can deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently. Continuous learning, collaboration, and automation are the cornerstones of successful DevOps transformations, and platforms like LambdaTest can further accelerate this journey by optimizing testing and delivery processes.