A Guide to DevOps Infrastructure

Implementing a proper DevOps infrastructure helps teams work smarter, increases agility, and speeds up shipments. But what is driving this change and what challenges and benefits come with leveraging a DevOps approach to development?

It’s no secret that developing new digital apps, services, products, or solutions is now something no business can live without. Despite this, the development of digital offerings remains challenging for various reasons.

Therefore, organizations need to find a way to overcome these challenges if they want to produce the best digital offerings possible to their customers – hence the growing recognition of the business value of DevOps.

However, developing new ways of working to overcome certain challenges can itself come with its own challenges, so if organizations want to develop their own DevOps setup that works for them, they may want to consider looking into DevOps outsourcing services.

But how does DevOps infrastructure differ from traditional IT infrastructure? What are the key components of a DevOps infrastructure? How can organizations transition to a DevOps infrastructure model? And what role does automation play in DevOps infrastructure?

The following blog will answer all these questions but before it does, what exactly is meant by DevOps infrastructure?

What Is DevOps infrastructure?

Infrastructure automation in DevOps is the use of technology to manage and provision computing resources and environments automatically.

It streamlines provisioning, deployment, and testing – all essential for DevOps practices. This approach enhances efficiency, reduces manual errors, and supports continuous integration and delivery by enabling scalable and predictable operations.

It differs from traditional IT infrastructure by ensuring everyone is on the same page right from the beginning of any development process. It does this by breaking down barriers between development and operations teams, enabling teams to work together to outline and achieve the goals set down at the beginning of any development process together.

Moreover, it ensures that operations are aware of what was agreed on at the planning stage and keeps them aware of how provisioning is going, which in turn enables them to plan for the deployment stage accordingly.

In short, by implementing a DevOps infrastructure into their ways of working, organizations are able to work smarter and release faster by giving everyone working on development projects a 360-degree view of what is happening at any given time during a project’s lifecycle.

Additionally, it also enables development teams to be more agile as every decision they make is based on what their colleagues are doing in real-time. This gives them a better idea of delivery dates and deployment timelines etc., which ultimately brings everyone together – leading to faster shipments.

All of this is why implementing a DevOps approach into ways of working is important for any organization, but what drives DevOps forward?

What Is DevOps infrastructure as a code?

DevOps infrastructure is also known as infrastructure automation, and the use of code in this process is referred to as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code – automated or otherwise – rather than through manual processes.

IaC is mainly used in configuration control of infrastructure specifications, where it enables all an organization’s specific infrastructure rules to be distributed easily among teams – ensuring the same setup is followed every time, and any changes to these rules can be tracked easily through version control.

This means that organizations can effectively use IaC to start any development projects with specific templates that development teams can start to build with to save time down the line – with any innovations being easy to track and used in future templates if necessary.

Therefore, there can be no doubt that leveraging IaC as the engine of any DevOps effort delivers benefits for any organization.

Benefits and challenges in DevOps infrastructure

In short, the three main challenges any organization needs to overcome to implement a successful DevOps setup into their organization is:

Changing the mindset of their company – by breaking down barriers between teams and bringing them together, organizations will ensure that their teams get used to working together and become more aware of how different areas of their pipeline work. This is crucial if organizations want their development and operations teams to work at their peaks during the DevOps process.

Shifting their focus towards implementing better methodologies not tools – by focusing more on methodologies, organizations are able to focus more on strategies, which in turn will enable them to choose the right tools for any job. In DevOps terms, taking this approach will get teams used to seeing the bigger picture before any work is started on any project and ensure the right tools are available to the employees working on said projects from day one.

Implementing automation at every level of their infrastructure – by doing this organizations immediately improve efficiency, but it does take a lot of trial and effort to get right. However, from a DevOps perspective implementing more automation into the organization means more menial tasks are now handled by machines, which enables developers and members of operations teams to focus on more business-critical tasks around the next product or service launch.

Some of these challenges may seem daunting but there can be no doubt the benefits that DevOps can deliver to any organization outweigh any challenge that comes with it. These benefits are:

• Reducing development costs
• Increasing speed of development
• Faster issue resolution and decreased complexity
• Greater scalability and availability
• More stable operating environments
• Better resource utilization
• Increased transparency between teams
• Increased innovation.

How to manage DevOps infrastructure?

To manage any DevOps setup effectively, organizations need to keep five steps in mind. These are:

• Planning – identify the right project goals, requirements, and people for a project, including assigning tasks. Organizations must also ensure everyone is aware of the project objectives at this stage, while also planning for infrastructure capacity accordingly to ensure the project can scale up or down as needed as it matures.
• Automated provisioning – create or delegate resources by using the capacity numbers drawn up in the previous stage as a guide, while automating who has access to different infrastructure systems such as Terraform.
• Automated deployment – decide how new software or updates are made available to customers, which involves leveraging the infrastructure created at the previous stage. However, there are two different ways organizations can deploy their software. Blue-Green deployment only gives customers access to the new technology or update after it has been thoroughly tested by development teams, while A/B version deployment gives some users access to the new updates etc. so developers can use their feedback to fix any bugs before rolling it out to the wider customer base.
• Testing – continue to test IaC configurations and automations from step two onwards as this enables organizations to catch bugs well before deployment, which brings a lot more organization to a process that can sometimes seem complex. Furthermore, this enables developers to work in a more stable environment than they might otherwise be used to.
• Support and feedback – here organizations will either need to commit to further testing or maintenance based on customer feedback. However, thanks to all team members being aware of the project’s goals, requirements, and status from day one, delegating team members to these crucial tasks is much easier for DevOps team managers than traditional team leads.

On top of these five steps, the key takeaway for managing any good DevOps setup is that every step of the DevOps process needs an element of continuation to succeed – continuous provisioning, testing, maintenance and support etc. This is the real secret to making DevOps work within any organization.

At Software Mind, we know that implementing an effective DevOps infrastructure can be challenging. But we also understand the benefits this can deliver to your business and how to implement it into your way of working at speed. This is why our experienced software team is happy to talk about what DevOps can do for you whenever you are.