Devops Best Practices

Here is a list of few devops practices that can be helpful in planning the infrastructre deployment/maintainance/migration in an easy way.

Tools and Tech

• Selection of tool which can provide an abstraction for infrastructure provisioning.
• Compatibility across tools (output of one can be input to another/several)

Automate and Orchestrate

• Everything should be automated (from image creation till infrastructure deployment, Application/Service Deployment) ⇒ Single Click Deployment
• Automated Testing of the automated process
• Self Healing (consisting of replacing an unhealthy instance with a healthy one)
• Scope for improvements

Maintainance

• Upgradations/Migrations (eg, redis upgradation without downtime)
• Automated scripts written during the early stage of the project ideally helps for upgradation and improvements.

Monitoring

• Not limiting just to heap memory, CPU utilization etc monitoring/logging
• Creation of a simulated environment with the end user’s perspective.
• Checking request time from all the servers (app/dbs etc), effectiveness of the load balancers.
• Using the simulated environment to create alerts and at the same time following up with counter-actions
• Dashboard for effective and quick counter-measures

Security

• System/Application/Infrastructure/Network Security
• Scheduled job which updates an environment with the latest security patches
• Following few security standards such as Penetration Testing/ Vulnerability Assessment etc.

Culture

• Leveraging the existing skills and using the relevant tools accordingly. A python programmer would be able to use ansible as a configuration mgmt tool which has support for python scripts.