DevOps Best Practices #

This page captures practical standards that work in real production environments.

1. Standardize the software delivery workflow #

• Use trunk-based development or short-lived feature branches
• Enforce pull requests with automated checks
• Keep environments consistent across dev, staging, and prod
• Treat artifacts as immutable (build once, promote many)

2. Build secure CI/CD pipelines #

• Run unit, integration, and security checks on each pull request
• Use signed artifacts and provenance where possible
• Store secrets in a dedicated secret manager (not in git)
• Introduce deployment gates for high-risk services

3. Prefer progressive delivery #

Adopt deployment patterns that reduce risk:

• rolling deployments
• canary deployments
• blue/green releases
• feature flags for controlled rollout

4. Manage infrastructure as code #

• Keep IaC in version control
• Separate reusable modules from environment overlays
• Review infra changes the same way as application code
• Use policy-as-code guardrails for compliance and security

5. Make observability non-optional #

Every service should include:

• service-level dashboards
• actionable alerts with ownership
• structured logs with correlation IDs
• traces across critical request paths

6. Define reliability targets early #

• Set SLIs and SLOs per service
• Use error budgets to balance reliability and feature delivery
• Run blameless postmortems with corrective actions

7. Optimize for developer experience (DX) #

• provide clear templates for services and pipelines
• reduce local setup friction with dev containers or scripts
• document runbooks and escalation paths
• invest in internal platforms and self-service workflows

8. Treat cost as an engineering concern #

• monitor cost by service/team/environment
• right-size workloads and set autoscaling policies
• enforce retention and lifecycle policies for logs and storage
• regularly clean stale cloud resources

9. Align team structure to ownership #

• assign explicit ownership for services and on-call
• keep operational feedback loops close to developers
• define interfaces between platform, app, and security teams

10. Improve continuously with data #

Track trends in reliability and delivery metrics monthly, then prioritize improvements with the highest operational return.

Practical implementation checklist #

• Source control standards documented
• CI/CD templates established
• IaC module strategy defined
• On-call and incident process documented
• Baseline dashboards and SLOs published
• Security scans integrated in pipelines
• Cost visibility dashboards available per team