DevOps Adoption Checklist

DevOps Adoption Checklist

Want to switch to DevOps?

But don’t know how to do it?

Or looking for a proven roadmap that can boost your DevOps journey from Day 1? 

If you said yes to all these questions, then you’re at the right place.

But don’t worry we are not going to bombard you with tons of practices, case studies, and forecasts that sometimes complicate even the most simple tasks. Instead, what we are going to tell you is a lot easier, and it has the capacity to put you way ahead in the race.

In this article, we will unveil an infallible DevOps adoption checklist to smoothen your transition to a new software development approach.

All you have to do is streamline your processes according to this checklist and relax.

So, let’s start with the…

DevOps Adoption Checklist:

• Make the Entire Team Understand the Software Lifecycle: Your team needs to

  understand the overall lifecycle of the application, and which part of the life cycle the application is currently in. This helps all team members know what they are required to do right now and in the future.

• Reduce Cycle Time: Aim to minimize the time it takes to move from ideas to usable software. Limit the size and scope of individual releases to keep the test burden low. Automate the build, test, configuration, and deployment processes whenever possible. Clear any obstacles to communication among developers, and between developers and operations.
• Develop a Learning Mindset: Failures are inevitable, but it's important to learn from failures to avoid repeating them. If an operational failure occurs, prioritize the issue, document the cause and solution, and share any lessons that were learned. Update your build processes to automatically detect that kind of failure in the future. 
• Spend Time on Building New Skills: Both failures and successes provide good learning opportunities. Before moving on to new projects, allow enough time to gather the important lessons, and make sure those lessons are absorbed by your team. Also, give the team the time to build skills, experiment, and learn about new tools and techniques.
• Document Operations: Document all tools, processes, and automated tasks with the same level of quality as your product code. Document the current design and architecture of any systems you support, along with recovery processes and other maintenance procedures. Focus on the steps you actually perform, not theoretically optimal processes. Regularly review and update the documentation. For code, make sure that meaningful comments are included, especially in public APIs, and use tools to automatically generate code documentation whenever possible.
• Automate Testing: Manually testing software is tedious and susceptive to error. Automate common testing tasks and integrate the tests into your build processes. Automated testing ensures consistent test coverage. Integrated UI tests should also be performed by an automated tool. 
• Measure Performance: An application might work fine under test conditions, and then have problems in production due to scale or resource limitations. Always define the maximum expected capacity and usage limits. Further, incorporate tests to make sure the application can handle those limits but also test what happens when those limits are exceeded. Capacity testing should be performed at regular intervals. The ideal time to run performance and capacity tests is after the initial release. Use historical data to fine-tune tests and determine what types of tests need to be performed.
• Automate Deployments: Automate deploying the application to test, staging, and production environments. Automation enables faster and more reliable deployments and ensures consistent deployments to any supported environment. It removes the risk of human error caused by manual deployments. It also makes it easy to schedule releases for convenient times to minimize any effects of potential downtime. 
• Use Continuous Integration: Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developer code into a central codebase on a regular schedule and then automatically performing standard build and test processes. CI ensures that an entire team can work on a codebase, at the same time, without having conflicts. It also ensures that code defects are found as early as possible. Preferably, the CI process should run every time that code is committed or checked in. At the very least, it should run once per day. 
• Use Continuous Delivery: Continuous delivery (CD) is the practice of ensuring that code is always ready to deploy, by automatically building, testing, and deploying code to production-like environments. Adding continuous delivery to create a full CI/CD pipeline will help you detect code defects sooner, and ensure that properly tested updates can be released in a very short time.

• Use Continuous Deployment: This is an additional process that automatically takes any updates that have passed through the CI/CD pipeline and deploys them into production. Continuous deployment requires robust automatic testing and advanced process planning, which may not suit all teams. 
• Leverage Immutable Infrastructure: Immutable infrastructure is the principle that you shouldn’t modify infrastructure after it’s deployed to production. Otherwise, you can get into a state where ad hoc changes have been applied, making it hard to know exactly what changed. Immutable infrastructure works by replacing entire servers as part of any new deployment. This allows the code and the hosting environment to be tested and deployed as a block. Once it is deployed, infrastructure components aren't modified until the next build and deploy cycle.
• Use Containers: Containers provide a standard package-based interface for deploying applications. Using containers, an application is deployed using self-contained packages that include any software, dependencies, and files needed to run the application, which greatly simplifies the deployment process. Containers also create an abstraction layer between the application and the underlying operating system, which provides consistency across environments. This abstraction can also isolate a container from other processes or applications running on a host. 
• Use Configuration Management: Configuration changes should be planned, visible to operations, and recorded. This could take the form of a configuration management database or a configuration-as-code approach. Configuration should be audited regularly to ensure that what's expected is actually in place.
• Use a Bug Tracking System to Track Issues: Without a good way to track issues, it's easy to miss items, duplicate work, or introduce additional problems. Don't rely on informal person-to-person communication to track the status of bugs. Use a bug tracking tool to record details about problems, assign resources to address them and provide an audit trail progress and status.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this article carefully, you already know that it is going to help you a lot, but as time progresses you should be ready to welcome change. By change we mean, you must not restrict yourself to this checklist only as DevOps keeps on changing. Certainly, new tools and processes will come and you should be willing to incorporate them into your organization. However, this checklist will help you get started the way you have ever dreamed or even better. 

Besides this, after having a dream start, gauge your DevOps initiatives’ accuracy with KPIs and Metrics. And if you feel stuck anywhere, consult a DevOps professional.