DevOps provides many of the founding principles and best practices for building cloud-native apps. These include:
Agile Project Management — Agile project management is flexible and iterative to designing and developing software. Agile dovetails with cloud technologies nicely, as the development style supports rapid deployments enabled by the cloud.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) — CI/CD is a deployment approach that uses automation to quickly test and deploy new apps, updates, and patches. Continuous capabilities have reduced deployment time from weeks to hours.
Monitor DevOps Pipeline — Automation is a game-changer, but to prevent errors within the automated pipeline there must be someone to oversee it. A human overseer will always be a valuable best practice.
Observability — Observability describes the movement towards greater application situational awareness. By compiling logs, traces, and metrics, teams can determine how their application is running, and make predictions about how it will function in other systems.
Continuous Feedback — The theme of CI/CD is creating a feedback mechanism to draw continuous development inspiration. It’s a truth that cloud-native applications are always undergoing fine-tuning. By accepting this cycle and listening to feedback, teams can get ahead of problems.
Design For Failure — Accepting that there will be failures is a tenant of Agile thinking. Cloud-native environments are designed for rapid and continuous development, which means that designing for perfection can counter-intuitively cause major delays. Rather, fail quickly, fail often, recover faster.