Sharing deployment best practices helps all developers

Developers are constantly innovating better and more efficient ways to deploy software, but not all teams are privy to the new strategies. We as a developer community need to eliminate all gatekeeping and share best practices. What benefits one team will help another, allowing us to continuously build on these improvements together.

Deployment velocity drives business value, but only if the software is reliable. Users won't care about receiving frequent updates if they don't work. Sharing deployment best practices can eliminate manual tasks and enable developers to focus on coding, leading to more reliable deployments and apps and more efficient processes.

Benefits of eliminating gatekeeping

Gatekeeping among developers is frequently unintentional. DevOps teams have plenty of work to do, and sometimes, sharing experiences and methods falls by the wayside. When this happens, new developers spend years learning through trial and error and developing their own strategies. But there's no need to reinvent the wheel when excellent solutions already exist. Instead of spending time troubleshooting and creating processes for deployment, developers could be delivering business value through better code and more efficient software cycles.

Software development processes grow increasingly complex, with nearly unlimited step combinations to reach the same outcome. Developers have enough to think about without needing to develop even more new methods, and when teams work in silos, that's exactly what happens. With each group doing its own thing, software innovation happens at different rates for each, making it challenging to predict business performance and needs. Getting everyone on the same page enables more precise expectations and opens the door to collaboration.

Continuous deployment as a vehicle for best practices

How can DevOps teams standardize best practices? By adopting continuous deployment. The automated process pushes code into production, building on continuous integration and delivery processes. This declarative approach ensures each software change follows the same validation logic, simplifies delivery and makes deployment predictable, repeatable and, most importantly, reliable. A recent report showed reliability as developers' top app development and deployment priority.

Not every team is aware of continuous deployment and its benefits. Some developers focus on basic tasks such as committing and delivering code to a production environment. They may be overwhelmed by the thought of a progressive release. This is where sharing practices is key. Continuous deployment is less complicated than it may seem. It automates tedious steps and does not require advanced deployment skills. Developers can write code with the assurance of an efficient, dependable and self-sustaining deployment.

No need to solve a problem that already has a solution

Why spend time solving a problem when the solution already exists? Some teams develop their own deployment tools to cut costs, but this strategy is not scalable or efficient. As complexity increases, the tools won't be able to execute effectively, and teams will need to spend more time building them instead of coding. DIY tools can also create short-sighted decision-making and reliance on a checklist, causing developers to neglect the larger goal of boosting performance metrics.

 At the end of the day, adopting an existing tool is less work than building one. Many companies are realizing the benefits of managed services -- these tools are expected to account for 18 percent of IT budgets in 2023, up 3 percent from 2020. And according to Gartner, 70 percent of organizations will implement structured automation by 2025.

Using an existing tool to automate deployment enhances future production value by improving the four DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for code change, change failure rate and time to restore service. With less time spent manually creating deployment paths and monitoring for problems, teams can focus on meeting growing user expectations.

Our developer community has already done the work to optimize solutions. Teams should take advantage of the existing and proven strategies. By sharing best practices, we can bypass busy work and focus on creating business value by improving software quality and deployment velocity. Additionally, we can build on these innovations to develop an enhanced set of best practices. By working together, we help ourselves and our end users now and in the future.

Image credit: nd3000 / Shutterstock

Andrew Backes is the VP of Engineering at Armory and was the first employee at the company. Over the last six years, he's established the Armory platform as a reliable software delivery platform for enterprises and built a world-class engineering team. He was previously an engineer at @ShareThis, where he worked on Big Data and built internal development tools. Before that, he ran his own IT consulting business.