Unlock Business Value Through Effective DevOps Infrastructure Management

By Anil Mahale

Effective and efficient DevOps infrastructure management is essential for modern organizations seeking to streamline their development processes and accelerate delivery cycles. By implementing sound DevOps practices, teams can automate and optimize infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and deployment, enabling seamless collaboration between development and operations teams.

Continuous monitoring and feedback loops enable teams to identify and address issues proactively, ensuring optimal performance and reliability. By adopting effective DevOps infrastructure management practices, organizations can unlock the full potential of their development processes, driving innovation and delivering value to customers with greater speed and efficiency.

The State of Cloud Technology

Development processes are moving toward cloud-native and microservices infrastructure, and technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) play a larger role in operations. In recent years, infrastructure as code (IaC) has been a driver of significant change, particularly in cloud computing and automation. With IaC, developers can easily manage and provide infrastructure, and write scripts to automate replication. IaC also increases efficiency and automation and allows teams to use version control to track and roll back infrastructure changes as needed.

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Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures are becoming more common as organizations seek to increase flexibility and avoid potential costs or privacy risks. Using a single cloud provider can yield significant control to an external organization should any issues arise on the provider's end. A mix of on-premises and cloud architecture can also help organizations stay agile, allowing organizations to move in and out of cloud infrastructure as needed. By diversifying architectural assets, organizations can improve data security and operational agility.

Whatever mix of architectures an organization uses, however, the best strategy is rooted in their specific needs, focusing on profitability and customer satisfaction. Overly complex systems not only cost more, but they also reduce the return on investment (ROI) and efficiency. Innovation delivers services to customers faster and more efficiently than before. With the plethora of technologies available today, it's imperative for organizations to be clear about what provides real value to reduce the cost and time spent on infrastructure issues.

The DevOps Cycle

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The DevOps lifecycle involves a continuous feedback loop that moves development through a number of phases. The tech education website GeeksforGeeks identifies these phases as plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, and monitor. Continuous monitoring gathers information that returns the process to the planning stage for future improvements. Rather than offering an end to a project, the process demands a mindset of continuous improvement.

This DevOps loop plays a significant role in moving toward more streamlined development processes and accelerated delivery cycles. With this process, the silo between departments and teams largely disappears. Developers and quality assurance, DevOps, and release managers attend the same meetings and share the same goals. This shared understanding is essential for a collaborative environment.

Adopting DevOps infrastructure management practices encourages the use of solutions like IaC, making deployments more repeatable, scalable, and reliable. Automation and continuous monitoring free up resources to focus on a broader range of tasks, including security, developer experience, and time to market. Robust documentation processes are critical to preserve this culture of continuous improvement, efficiency, and productivity over time. Should a project be handed to a new team, documentation helps maintain continuity and can reveal historical inefficiencies or issues. Because IaC is code, it's easy to view version controls from months or years in the past.

Focus on Simplicity

As cloud-native technologies become more popular, thoughtful architecture design is vital because the decisions made during this process will significantly impact the business moving forward. It is critical for decisions to be made with the company's needs and success in mind. Simplicity and optimization should guide infrastructure design and management, not only for efficiency but for cost. While immensely useful, cloud technologies can run a significant bill, and if a tool is not driving business goals or providing value to customers, it won't provide a meaningful ROI.

A lean and efficient cloud architecture promotes resource optimization, reducing the risk that tools, services, or processes are started and forgotten as teams shift and change. It's essential to clean up old or unused tools regularly. The goal is to deliver features and benefits to customers, so keeping architecture simple reduces bloat and inefficiency. This also prioritizes business and customer needs and increases scalability and faster time to market.

Research from Google's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team shows the value of balancing customer and organizational needs. In the "State of DevOps Report 2023," DORA measured the predicted organizational and team performance to predict burnout and job satisfaction rates of four types of teams: user-centric, feature-driven, developing, and balanced team types. Ultimately, the balanced team type offered the best overall results, with the lowest levels of burnout and strong results on all other metrics. The balanced team type "uses technology in a sustainable way to achieve good organizational performance, good team performance, and good job satisfaction."

Business-Oriented Tech

As the amount of data created increases, businesses in every industry rely more on that data. According to Statista, between 2020 and 2025, the amount of data "created, captured, copied, and consumed globally" is projected to more than double from 64.2 to 180 zettabytes. The risk associated with security breaches is also rising. Many well-known companies have experienced breaches or incurred fines for non-compliance, including Amazon, Equifax, Capital One, and Instagram. CSO Online calculated that the largest fines for 15 international companies totaled $4.4 billion and ranged from $120 million (Morgan Stanley) to $1.3 billion (Meta/Facebook). The question is no longer "if" a business will experience a breach but "when." Continuous patching and security monitoring are critical to reducing risk. For these reasons, regularly checking and updating tools and applications, regardless of their vulnerability, can significantly increase an organization's security posture.

Adopting network segmentation and utilizing the principle of least privilege are fundamental to maintaining security. Least privilege minimizes the risk associated with inappropriate user access, while segmentation can limit the potential for wrong access and how far an attack can spread. Integrating security into the integrated development environment (IDE) can help monitor vulnerabilities before code submission. Most importantly, however, automated security testing is vital; with automated testing, developers are notified more quickly, reducing downtime.

Since DevOps is a cyclical loop, with continuous customer feedback spurring further development, improvement, and deployment, the increasingly sophisticated automation of AI and ML allows teams to focus on driving efficiency, security, and innovation. Automation can provide quality assurance and security feedback more quickly, enabling a faster turnaround for patches, fixes, and releases. Ultimately, automation and the entire DevOps infrastructure management process help ensure that developers can focus more on the development process than maintenance or build and infrastructure issues.

Even as AI and ML remake the technical landscape, new technologies emerge. Keeping up with these advances while maintaining data security is an ongoing project, and the only way to thrive over the long term is to embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Staying on top of new technologies and threats while evaluating and updating current processes, tools, and architecture is vital. A well-designed DevOps process and architecture is the foundation of organizational agility, security, and innovation, but all efforts are still directed toward the company's needs and customer success. The understanding that the work is never truly done is at the heart of an effective DevOps infrastructure management strategy.

About the Author:

Anil Mahale is a director of engineering with more than 15 years of experience in software development, DevOps, open-source security research, vulnerability assessment, and product security. He currently leads a team of platform engineers and is responsible for the security of a zero trust/network segmentation product line, including the engineering infrastructure and OS platform. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas. Connect with Anil on LinkedIn.