Congratulations on your first deployment! You’ve worked hard to get to this point, and you should be proud of what you’ve accomplished. But the work doesn’t stop here – in fact; it’s only just beginning. As a DevOps engineer, it’s your responsibility to ensure that each deployment is successful and helps the company move closer to its goals. This blog post will discuss some strategies that will help you succeed with your next deployment.
Steps and strategies you need to adopt after your first app deployment
- Stay informed about new technologies: Keeping up with the latest trends and technologies in the DevOps world is essential for ensuring that you’re using the best tools and strategies possible. For example, knowing which artifactory to use between GitLab vs. JFrog, can go a long way. If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of resources available online that can help get you started.
- Use a monitoring tool: A good monitoring tool is a key to understanding how your application performs in production and detecting any early problems. There are many options available, so be sure to choose one that suits your needs and budget.
- Set up alerts: In addition to using a monitoring tool, it’s essential to set up alerts for when something goes wrong with your application. This will help you fix any issues as quickly as possible.
- Create a plan for emergencies: It’s always good to have a plan in place for emergencies, such as server outages or security breaches. By having a plan in place, you’ll be able to respond quickly and effectively if something goes wrong.
- Use a version control system: A version control system is essential for managing changes to your codebase over time. It also makes it easy to track down any issues that may have arisen in production. There are many options available, so be sure to choose one that fits your needs.
- Collaborate with your team: Working collaboratively with your team is essential for success in a DevOps environment. By collaborating, you’ll be able to share knowledge and ideas, which will help improve the quality of your codebase and reduce the risk of errors.
- Perform a post-deployment check: After your app has been deployed, take a step back and check the overall performance. Verify that all components are working as expected and that there are no unexpected errors. This will help you identify potential problems before they become too difficult to fix.
- Review logs and metrics: Inspecting logs and metrics is one of the most critical steps in understanding how your app performs after it’s gone live. You need to be able to identify any issues or discrepancies as soon as possible so you can address them promptly.
- Use automation for error tracking: Automated error tracking can help speed up the process of identifying and fixing problems with your app. By using the right tools, you can quickly pinpoint the source of an issue and get it fixed fast.
- Use feedback channels: It’s essential to have multiple channels for receiving feedback from your users. This can include everything from surveys and questionnaires to social media platforms and customer support channels.
- Take advantage of A/B testing: A/B testing is a great way to test different versions of your app against each other to see which one performs better. You can use this data to make decisions about future changes or enhancements to your app. A/B testing for app deployment can be instrumental if you’re trying to decide between two different options.
- Use a staging environment: A staging environment is essential for testing changes to your app before they go live. This will help ensure no unexpected problems when the changes are implemented in production.
Tools you should use to implement the above strategies:
- Version Control: Git, Mercurial, Bitbucket
- Deployment Automation: Ansible, Puppet, Chef
- Monitoring Tools: Nagios, Zabbix, Splunk
- Application Performance: New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics
- Error Tracking: Airbrake, Sentry, PagerDuty
- Application Performance Management (APM): New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, CA APM
- A/B Testing: Google Experiments, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer.
- Staging Environment: Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure Websites.
How is DevOps better than the typical software development cycle for post-deployment steps?
Deployment in a DevOps environment is usually much faster and smoother than in a traditional software development cycle. This is due to the use of automation, which helps speed up deploying changes to your app. In addition, DevOps encourages collaboration between team members, which can help reduce the risk of errors. By using the right tools and following best practices, you can ensure that your deployment process goes as smoothly as possible.
- DevOps enables faster deployments with less chance of error
- It encourages better communication and collaboration among team members
- Tools and automation help make deployments more efficient
- A staging environment allows for testing before going live
- The use of feedback channels provides insight into user experience
- A/B Testing allows for experimentation with different app versions
