DevOps seems to be an emerging topic “du jour” in the world of software development. And like it or not, it is showing no signs of slowing down. If used correctly, DevOps can be helpful—from making teams (developers and testers) work seamlessly to automating routine tasks, DevOps has proved its awesomeness in just a few years. So what is helping make DevOps a huge success? Scalability!
Technically speaking, scalability is something that defines the exact capability of the system, and it has to increase frequently to accommodate the ever-changing needs of the world. As customers rely more heavily on your services, achieving hyper-scale is becoming more crucial. To ensure scalability, you may need to redesign or rethink, your different processes and systems.
Say, for instance, customer demand seems to have reached its apex. Preparing comprehensive strategies that focus on scalability has become prime importance.
To get the most out of your application, invest in DevOps-related time and dollars. With the introduction of the cloud, developers are focusing on building features and products while ops (operations) are making sure everything stays in sync. At the same time, many traditional ops functions have been outsourced to cloud providers.
Scaling DevOps
Here are some best practices that can assist you in creating scalable, secure and high-performance deployments.
Be Vigilant
With the increase in the adoption of visualization, networks are more complex and heterogeneous, and so are the security risks associated with them. The only way left to manage these networks is by automating key management functions. Here is when DevOps comes into play. But for that, the method must be included with security as a key component, or the volume and pace of network would eventually change—several technologies such as SDN and virtualization will skyrocket the level of IT risk like never before. Another challenge is that security is still considered as an afterthought. And so-called business inhibitors are seen advising an organization on what can’t be done instead of how to do things securely. This is an area where security, developers and operation teams must foster a level of trust, or collaboration won’t exist. The only way to do this is incrementally and with vigilance.
Watch Changes Carefully
Considering DevOps as a collaborative mindset enforces professionals to come up with faster and more efficient ways to deploy, operate and upgrade applications. When new releases are delivered, several tools can ensure consistent configuration of infrastructure and software components. These tools also can be used to remediate security concerns by constantly validating the proper application of security’s best practices and taking automatic countermeasures.
Ease of Use
Automation and repetitiveness are what DevOps is all about. Fortunately, there are a few tools that are capable of automating the building and configuration of VMs. However, make sure you have the adequate horsepower to run this capability, either in-house—which is trickier to scale dynamically—or in the cloud, if your product is amenable to that. At the end of the day, it’s all about how you make your product installation and configuration easy.
Managing Gateways
While building any new goal or coming up with the best culture between development and operation teams, keep certain gates between functions to ensure that the production environment remains stable. Try to structure it in such a way that operations include development discussions and daily scrums. By doing this, operations teams simultaneously will understand what changes will be made in future releases. By integrating automation in both testing and operations, you will be able to find issues before they reach production. In addition, you’ll realize cost efficiencies and better quality operations.
Conclusion
In today’s fast-paced development environment, a well-thought preparation strategy for mass scalability is a must to make the entire process smooth and easy. DevOps reduces lead-up anxiety by getting a head start on planning, so you have more time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Adding scalability in your strategy enables you to experiment and try new things without fearing failure. Testing new approaches ahead of time to see what does or doesn’t work will only help you learn and make your scalability efforts that much more effective for the future, as your company continues down the path of hyper-growth and hyper-scale.
