Technology companies today face numerous challenges, including system failures, downtime while services are restored, security issues, and outdated technology stacks. Most of these issues point to problems in infrastructure, the application, and/or the deployment process.
Reliable Systems: What Affects the Efficiency of Infrastructure Development
Here, we’ll examine these factors through the lens of setup and optimization and suggest ways to minimize their chances of failure.
- IT Infrastructure Audit
- Effective architecture design
- Stack modernity
- Process automation
- Security
- Application
- Code quality
- Cloud readiness
- Security
- Deployments and Code Delivery
- Observability
- Metrics
- Tracing
- Logs
Let’s take a look at each of these aspects one by one.
1] IT Infrastructure Audit
Effective architecture design
Generally, when working on architecture design, proceed from your applications’ performance profiles and how they align with your business goals.
Strategize effectively:
- Gather information on your existing workloads. Where do your applications currently run, and who uses them? Are there any bottlenecks in computing performance, memory, or networking?
- Are your systems capable of maintaining production workloads whilst aligning with SLA? Perform capacity planning and workload estimation to check.
- Follow best practices of fault tolerance and reliability when architecting your systems. Design scalable systems from which you can easily add and remove resources in response to demand changes.
- If you are in a cloud, ensure the services suite matches operational needs.
- How reliable is your infrastructure? Automate and test failure management procedures.
Stack modernity
Take advantage of the latest available features and broaden your technical capabilities. An up-to-date stack makes automation easier, allowing for a faster development cycle, fewer bugs, and smoother deploys.
Process automation
Automating routine work saves time and frees up human resources for more creative tasks.
- Accelerates development process
- Improves code quality
- Simplifies infrastructure management
- Boosts business processes
Main infrastructure automation areas include:
- DevOps Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- DevOps CI/CD for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
- Autoscaling
- Automated monitoring
2] Security
A security strategy is a set of measures to protect your data, systems, and assets from threats and attacks. Architect your systems according to best practices in identity and access management, infrastructure protection, detective controls, and data protection.
3] Application
Code quality
Poor code quality can result in incidents, rollbacks, and production issues. DevOps development companies use the change failure rate to measure the quality of deployed software, one of the DORA metrics that indicate how safe your code is against failures.
Consider introducing test-driven development (TDD) – a core Agile practice that implies writing unit tests for each program component and running tests to check whether the component works. If not, refactor the code until it conforms to the acceptance criteria.
Use feature flags – a DevOps technique that allows switching features on/off during runtime. If a flag is on, new code is executed; if off, the code is skipped. This enables gradual feature rollouts and more straightforward bug fixes.
Cloud readiness
As most software is now delivered as a service, cloud architecture design compliance with cloud standards is key. Firstly, this applies to an application’s design – how suitable it is for deployment on modern cloud platforms and how easily it can be containerized.
To ensure your application is cloud-ready and to perform a cloud cost optimization, evaluate it according to the 12 Factor App principles – a methodology for building SaaS applications. Despite being created a decade before containers and Kubernetes became mainstream, the principles are still relevant and synthesize best practices for building scalable, portable, and cloud-ready applications.
Security
Developers often consider security last when it should be an indispensable part of the process. Many cyberattacks happen by exploiting software vulnerabilities – programming mistakes or oversights that leave applications, servers, and websites exposed. Adhering to security by design principles – a list of security standards developed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) – helps developers build applications with high-security levels.
4] Deployments and Code Delivery
Software deployments vary across teams, organizations, DevOps companies, and services. Creating a foundation for better software delivery will make your deployments more reliable and mitigate the possible impact through performance optimization. Consider implementing the following:
- CI/CD. The continuous methodologies of software development imply triggering automated mechanisms that build, test and deploy code when new changes are submitted to a codebase. Since every CI/CD process stage is covered with tests, this quality gate blocks incorrect code.
- Iterate in shorter cycles. Your code will be more readable, making it easier to test.
- Deployment strategy. Choose the best option for your application, or combine strategies based on service-specific needs, its performance profile, and possible business impact.
- Automated rollbacks. Provided all steps are automated, rollbacks minimize the impact of a failed deployment or a broken version, streamlining the release process.
Observability
To prevent incidents from happening, we must watch the signals our systems send out.
Metrics
We want to monitor two types of metrics:
- Infrastructure-specific relating to the systems’ operational layer.
- Application-specific that delivers information on a service and helps assess its business logic.
Tracing
Tracing is an indispensable tool for microservices architectures. This approach delivers the necessary information for developers to detect slow calls, long-running operations, failing services, and where they happen.
Logs
Log monitoring register occasional and vital events, such as access logs for a web service or various error conditions. Analyzing logs enables tech teams to pinpoint a problem and take preventative action.
Conclusion
In this article, we have outlined the main reasons why your infrastructure, application and/or deployment could fail and provided recommendations on how to tune them for performance optimization. Check how well your systems are prepared for production challenges, use SHALB official website https://shalb.com/, and try our real-time infrastructure audit. Alternatively, to obtain a detailed expert overview, book a call so that we can discuss your issue in depth.
SHALB provides DevOps, SRE, DevOps consulting services, CI/CD Services, and System Architect Services for software teams globally with 24×7 support. We build and maintain fault-tolerant cloud native systems using the Infrastructure as Code approach, Kubernetes management, Serverless, and Terraform technologies.
