GitHub Availability Report: March 2024
In March, we experienced two incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.
This is the second post in our series on DevOps fundamentals. For a guide to what DevOps is and answers to common DevOps myths check out part one. What role…
This is the second post in our series on DevOps fundamentals. For a guide to what DevOps is and answers to common DevOps myths check out part one.
First things first—automation is one of the key principles for accelerating with DevOps. As noted in my last blog post, it enables consistency, reliability, and efficiency within the organization, making it easier for teams to discover and troubleshoot problems.
However, as we’ve worked with organizations, we’ve found not everyone knows where to get started, or which processes can and should be automated. In this post, we’ll discuss a few best practices and insights to get teams moving in the right direction.
The path to DevOps automation is continually evolving. Before we dive into best practices, there are a few common guidelines to keep in mind as you’re deciding what and how you automate.
Now that our guidelines are in place, we can evaluate which sets of processes we need to automate. We’ve broken some best practices for DevOps automation into four categories to help you get started.
We often think of the term “DevOps” as being synonymous with “CI/CD”. At GitHub we recognize that DevOps includes so much more, from enabling contributors to build and run code (or deploy configurations) to improving developer productivity. In turn, this shortens the time it takes to build and deliver applications, helping teams add value and learn faster. While CI/CD and DevOps aren’t precisely the same, CI/CD is still a core component of DevOps automation.
Together, continuous integration and continuous delivery (commonly referred to as CI/CD) create a collaborative process for people to work on projects through shared ownership. At the same time, teams can maintain quality control through automation and bring new features to users with continuous deployment.
Change management is often a critical part of business processes. Like the automation guidelines, there are some common principles and tooling that development and operations teams can use to create consistency.
By now, you also may have heard of “infrastructure as code,” “configuration as code,” “policy as code,” or some of the other “as code” models. These models provide a declarative framework for managing different aspects of your operating environments through high level abstractions. Stated another way, you provide variables to a tool and the output is consistently the same, allowing you to recreate your resources consistently. DevOps implements the “as code” principle with several goals, including: an auditable change trail for compliance, collaborative change process via version control, a consistent, testable and reliable way of deploying resources, and as a way to lower the learning curve for new team members.
Operational insights are an invaluable component of any production environment. In order to understand the behaviors of your software in production, you need to have information about how it operates. Continuous monitoring—the processes and technology that monitor performance and stability of applications and infrastructure throughout the software lifecycle—provides operations teams with data to help troubleshoot, and development teams the information needed to debug and patch. This also leads into an important aspect of security, where DevSecOps takes on these principles with a security focus. Choosing the right monitoring tools can be the difference between a slight service interruption and a major outage. When it comes to gaining operational insights, there are some important considerations:
At this point, we’ve talked much about automation in the DevOps space, so is DevOps all about automation? Put simply, no. Automation is an important means to accomplishing this work efficiently between teams. Whether you’re new to DevOps or migrating from another set of automation solutions, testing new tooling with a small project or process is a great place to start. It will lay the foundation for scaling and standardizing automation across your entire organization, including how to measure effectiveness and progression toward your goals.
Regardless of which toolset you choose to automate your DevOps workflow, evaluating your teams’ current workflows and the information you need to do your work will help guide you to your tool and platform selection, and set the stage for success. Here are a few more resources to help you along the way:
Want to see what DevOps automation looks like in practice? See how engineers at Wiley build faster and more securely with GitHub Actions.