5 DevOps Best Practices To Manage A Successful Pipeline

There are several DevOps best practices to manage successful pipelines.

The DevOps methodology organizes team members, processes, and development platforms to deliver valuable releases faster.

These teams use continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automate, govern, and secure their development projects.

As a DevOps manager, successful pipelines allow your team to deliver value in a quick, safe, and consistent manner.

Fortunately, you can drive the success of your pipeline with several management best practices. In this post, we will discuss mission-critical DevOps best practices to manage a successful pipeline.

Security First Approach

Taking a “security first” approach is a best practice to manage your DevOps pipelines.

To harden your CI/CD pipelines against security breaches and other vulnerabilities, you should isolate them into secure internal networks.

Within these networks, implement identity and access management systems, VPNs or advanced two-factor authentication. Additionally, containerize agents on these secure networks. This way, you mitigate threat exposure and attack surfaces with the principle of least privilege.

Moreover, you should bake security into your entire development process, from start to finish. Even more, it will prove beneficial to stay on top of cyber security trends. Surely, a security first approach mitigates risks across your pipeline and DevOps processes enterprise-wide.

Continuous Feedback

Moreover, continuous feedback is a best practice for DevOps pipeline management. Leverage testing tools to automate continuous feedback within your DevOps pipeline. You can use platforms such as JFrog pipelines to for real-time interactive notifications and containerized repository management. These notifications easily identify bottlenecks or failures for your dev team.

Using these insights, they can determine where the error occurred, why it occurred, and how they can fix it.

This way, you accelerate the resolution of functionality errors with advanced code recommendations.

With quicker fixes, the team can push more stable software product releases throughout the year. Certainly, ensure the quality and usability of your DevOps pipeline deliveries with continuous feedback.

Automate Your Development Environments

Additionally, DevOps pipeline best practices require automating your development environments. Start by generating a baseline image to serve as a standard environment.

Then, simply copy the created image to create a new environment. With the proper access right settings and necessary applications, you spend less time installing or setting up new environments for team members. This way, you accelerate onboarding processes when adding new developers to your projects.

Moreover, you can leverage advanced tools with user-friendly interfaces and simple APIs to generate development images for your configurations. Absolutely, automated development environments accelerate your DevOps pipeline significantly.

Team Management

Furthermore, DevOps pipeline management best practices often involve team management. Ideally, your pipeline should be designed to support team workflows and development process.

It should offer your team members greater visibility into the software development life cycle. This way, you can facilitate collaboration between team members on various issues and concerns.

Of course, improved collaboration leads to stronger intra-team relationships, higher quality feedback, and well-designed product deliveries.

Additionally, team members can identify and resolve bugs, errors, or other issues in a significantly accelerated manner.

With quicker issue resolutions, your team can ship higher-quality apps, updates, and software using less resources. Definitely, team management facilitates your team’s ability to work within the DevOps pipeline.

Leverage Microservices

Lastly, you can implement various microservices as a best practice for DevOps pipeline management. With microservices in your pipeline implementation, you provide high flexibility, scalability, and availability. You can simplify tooling modifications, component upgrades, and workflow adjustments to the unique needs of the project. Additionally, microservices can harden system and data security by isolating vulnerabilities. Moreover, the components enable quicker adjustments to changing development priorities. When modifying these priorities, implement one microservice at a time. This way, you maintain compatibility and pipeline uptime. Assuredly, learn about why your business should care about microservices.

You can manage successful DevOps pipelines with a variety of management best practices.

Implementing the best practices, you can stay ahead of team collaboration, productivity, and efficiency.

For example, a security first approach mitigates significant, potentially-costly risks across your pipeline and DevOps processes enterprise-wide.

Second, automate development environments to accelerate your DevOps pipeline.

Third, leverage continuous feedback to ensure quality, usability, and compatibility in your software releases. Next, manage your team members themselves to improve collaboration and foster proper usage of your pipeline.

Finally, microservices ensure constant DevOps pipeline uptime, compatibility, and flexibility to handle any project. Of course, these best practices have a massive impact on the speed, efficiency, and success of your DevOps pipeline.