6 ways to overcome the complexity of DevOps and prepare for 2023

As we venture into 2023, the DevOps community finds itself in a whole new, complex world. Many modern application deployments have moved from on-premises to the cloud and to the edge, with devices such as junction boxes, train signaling equipment, cameras, POS and self-driving vehicles all making data available at 5G speeds.

Remote employees use business applications across personal devices, multiple operating systems, and private and public clouds. These factors create extremely complex life cycles for software development, testing, integration, and production.

In this new age of complexity, automating collaboration and security without compromise is key to success. DevOps must work with developers, IT, designers, testers, cybersecurity teams, and different lines of business to determine how best to automate processes.

If you’re a developer or part of a development team, there are ways to prepare for the new year. But first, let’s look at the factors that cause this complexity.

Faster delivery request

Even as business factors change the way we use apps, developers continue to strive for agility to bring new products to market quickly and in ways that delight users. The challenge is to keep up with new requirements changed by a dynamic and unpredictable world.

The pandemic and the divided workforce

The effects of the pandemic continue to ripple through the tech community as more employees insist on working from home or maintaining hybrid work environments. To meet these needs, cloud migration strategies have shifted from a “cloud-first” approach to a “migrate everything now!” Providing easy and secure access to critical applications from anywhere will remain a priority for a long time.

Security and Compliance

Organizations must consider compliance with numerous regulations and internal policies, while anticipating new cyber attack techniques and challenges. Teams must work closely with compliance officers and security teams to ensure their applications meet their expectations before release.

Complexity has created a greater need for automation, but it has also made building automation more difficult, especially if it is an afterthought. Nowadays, there are a lot of activities related to the automation of DevOps. For example, there is test automation, build automation, and security automation. All of these categories must be addressed when working to tame complexity.

Here are 6 ways your organization can use DevOps to overcome complexity and prepare for the year ahead.

1. The factor of regulatory agility in early development

In regulated areas, regulators and legal teams increasingly have different requirements by industry. For example, if you work in healthcare, you need to ensure HIPAA compliance, or you need to use PCI DSS in e-commerce. As you develop applications, you must work through industry requirements and work closely with compliance and legal teams. It’s better to build them in early in the development process by incorporating concepts like compliance as code/policy code as waiting and re-addressing during compliance audits.

2. Comply with special safety requirements

Development teams must work closely, sometimes in parallel, with security to address ever-changing security threats. It is important to discuss specific threats and security use cases in addition to core functionality. Learn what safety practices to implement. Work to incorporate data accuracy and reliability testing into the development process as directed by security and compliance teams and ensure feedback is properly incorporated and continuously validated.

3. Find a common collaboration language

To achieve collaboration, you need to find a common language between stakeholders such as security, compliance, developers, and others. The best way to do this is to create a feedback loop. The loop involves detecting a problem or situation, determining the correct corrective action to solve the problem, completing the correction, and automating the process so that the problem does not occur again. If the problem pops up again, you’ll be ready to take action.

4. Manage security and compliance as code

Addressing security and compliance as code is the only way to maintain a common language among stakeholders. This is how security and compliance policies are codified and integrated into the development process. Sharing a common language across teams is essential to maintaining continuous visibility of your security and compliance posture.

5. Create a human free zone

Automation is an often-overlooked key to security and compliance, and is critical to simplifying the currently complex DevOps. When committing to an automation mentality, it’s important to create a human-free zone. In such a zone, developers initially execute code, and then automation takes over using zero-trust security principles.

So, for example, if an employee logs into a production server when they shouldn’t have access, the administrator is automatically notified. In the human-free zone, nothing and no one can change anything except the system programmed with certain rules and requirements. When everything goes through such an auditable automated process, administrators know that everything that goes into production will be compliant with policies and certain standards. Such policies can always be modified or adapted in a version-controlled manner to meet changing needs. By managing thoughtful secrets, such a human-free zone effectively prevents not only accidental mistakes, but also cybercrime attacks and tracks such attempts to verify and strengthen the process.

6. Know your goals

Before you can know if you are working effectively, you need to define your goals and your ability to measure them. Automation is both difficult and expensive. It is easy to fall into the trap of automating everything. Before you know if you are working effectively, you need to define your goals; then you can do “enough” automation to keep the system at an acceptable level. This covers everything from defining infrastructure configuration policies to security posture, governance policies and SLAs (service level agreements) across your organization’s infrastructure and applications.

All of this must be recorded in a coded process to automate the detection and mitigation processes. Once it’s done, you don’t have to spend time fixing issues, and it has a fast feedback loop that allows detection to run again after every environmental change.

And so you can achieve the speed and agility that development teams need to bring products to market.

To meet the challenges of next year, DevOps must improve security, compliance, and collaboration between all stakeholders to create, modify, and extend policies that meet the needs of their organizations. In 2023, there will undoubtedly be further challenges and significant changes, just as we have seen such drastic changes in the past two years. By improving your collaboration and automation efforts, you have a better chance of responding immediately.

This content is made possible by a guest author or sponsor; it was not written and does not necessarily reflect the views of the App Developer Magazine editorial staff.