So far in this activity, we have looked at fast delivery cycles and the DevOps lifecycle. practices. In this step, we will learn about the first building blocks of DevOps.

To be successful in the implementation of DevOps, organisations need to focus on the foundational aspects of DevOps. DevOps is about a culture that drives attitudes and behaviours. These include practices and habits that can be addressed to ensure effective transitioning to DevOps.

The Seven Key DevOps Practices:

• Configuration management: Understanding of what you are deploying, how you are deploying it and what the configuration is of items going into production.
• Release management: Understanding and controlling how you are building a release pipeline that you can trust.
• Continuous integration: Testing code and compiling it at every check-in and version control commit.
• Continuous deployment: Getting code into a test environment and into production on a rapid cadence.
• Infrastructure as Code: Making sure that, when you deploy your code, you have related infrastructure, checked into version control, for deploying changes to your environment in an automated fashion.
• Test automation: Automating unit, deployment, integration and user experience tests.
• Application performance monitoring: Monitoring production to get performance information, error information and usage information.

The Seven DevOps Habits

• Team autonomy and enterprise alignment: Mapping the business alignment with enterprise or team autonomy.
• Rigorous management of technical debt: Scheduling time to reduce technical debt.
• Focus on the flow of customer value: Developing an all-encompassing mindset if customer value. Think like a developer, a tester, IT and the customer.
• Hypothesis-driven development: Developing releases based on hypotheses extracted from customer insights.
• Evidence gathered in production: Gathering insights from what customers are doing in production.
• Live-site culture: Fostering a production mindset that encourages the drive to production.
• Manage infrastructure as a flexible resource: Treating infrastructure as cattle and not as _cats to avoid being too attached to the infrastructure to get rid of it if it does not work for you anymore.

With these attitudes and behaviours, you can really drive a DevOps culture in your organisation.

Join the discussion

Which of these points most appeals to your situation?

Use the discussion section below and let us know your thoughts. Try to respond to at least one other post and once you’re happy with your contribution, click the Mark as complete button to check the step off, then you can move to the next step.