OPS 5: How do you reduce defects, ease remediation, and improve flow into production?

Adopt approaches that improve flow of changes into production, that enable refactoring, fast feedback on quality, and bug fixing. These accelerate beneficial changes entering production, limit issues deployed, and enable rapid identification and remediation of issues introduced through deployment activities.

Resources

CI/CD for Serverless Applications on AWS
Design with Ops in Mind
AWS Developer Tools

Best Practices:

• Use version control: Use version control to enable tracking of changes and releases.

• Test and validate changes: Test and validate changes to help limit and detect errors. Automate testing to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort to test.

• Use configuration management systems: Use configuration management systems to make and track configuration changes. These systems reduce errors caused by manual processes and reduce the level of effort to deploy changes.

• Use build and deployment management systems: Use build and deployment management systems. These systems reduce errors caused by manual processes and reduce the level of effort to deploy changes.

• Perform patch management: Perform patch management to gain features, address issues, and remain compliant with governance. Automate patch management to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort to patch.

• Share design standards: Share best practices across teams to increase awareness and maximize the benefits of development efforts.

• Implement practices to improve code quality: Implement practices to improve code quality and minimize defects. For example, test-driven development, code reviews, and standards adoption.

• Use multiple environments: Use multiple environments to experiment, develop, and test your workload. Use increasing levels of controls as environments approach production to gain confidence your workload will operate as intended when deployed.

• Make frequent, small, reversible changes: Frequent, small, and reversible changes reduce the scope and impact of a change. This eases troubleshooting, enables faster remediation, and provides the option to roll back a change.

• Fully automate integration and deployment: Automate build, deployment, and testing of the workload. This reduces errors caused by manual processes and reduces the effort to deploy changes.

Improvement Plan

Use version control

Use version control: Maintain assets in version controlled repositories. Doing so supports tracking changes, deploying new versions, detecting changes to existing versions, and reverting to prior versions (for example, rolling back to a known good state in the event of a failure). Integrate the version control capabilities of your configuration management systems into your procedures.
Introduction to AWS CodeCommit
What is AWS CodeCommit?

Test and validate changes

Test and validate changes: Changes should be tested and the results validated at all lifecycle stages (for example, development, test, and production). Use testing results to confirm new features and mitigate the risk and impact of failed deployments. Automate testing and validation to ensure consistency of review, to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort.
What is AWS CodeBuild?
Local build support for AWS CodeBuild

Use configuration management systems

Use configuration management systems: Use configuration management systems to track and implement changes, to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort.
Infrastructure configuration management
AWS Config
What is AWS Config?
Introduction to AWS CloudFormation
What is AWS CloudFormation?
AWS OpsWorks
What is AWS OpsWorks?
Introduction to AWS Elastic Beanstalk
What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Use build and deployment management systems

Use build and deployment management systems: Use build and deployment management systems to track and implement change, to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort. Fully automate the integration and deployment pipeline from code check-in through build, testing, deployment, and validation. This reduces lead time, enables increased frequency of change, and reduces the level of effort.
What is AWS CodeBuild?
Continuous integration best practices for software development
Slalom: CI/CD for serverless applications on AWS
Introduction to AWS CodeDeploy - automated software deployment with Amazon Web Services
What is AWS CodeDeploy?

Perform patch management

Patch management: Patch systems to remediate issues, to gain desired features or capabilities, and to remain compliant with governance policy and vendor support requirements. In immutable systems, deploy with the appropriate patch set to achieve the desired result. Automate the patch management mechanism to reduce the elapsed time to patch, to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort to patch.
AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager

Share design standards

Share design standards: Share existing best practices, design standards, checklists, operating procedures, and guidance and governance requirements across teams to reduce complexity and maximize the benefits from development efforts. Ensure that procedures exist to request changes, additions, and exceptions to design standards to support continual improvement and innovation. Ensure that teams are aware of published content so that they can take advantage of content, and limit rework and wasted effort.
Delegating access to your AWS environment
Share an AWS CodeCommit repository
Easy authorization of AWS Lambda functions
Sharing an AMI with specific AWS accounts
Speed template sharing with an AWS CloudFormation designer URL
Using AWS Lambda with Amazon SNS

Implement practices to improve code quality

Implement practices to improve code quality: Implement practices to improve code quality to minimize defects and the risk of their being deployed. For example, test-driven development, pair programming, code reviews, and standards adoption.

Use multiple environments

Use multiple environments: Provide developers sandbox environments with minimized controls to enable experimentation. Provide individual development environments to enable work in parallel, increasing development agility. Implement more rigorous controls in the environments approaching production to allow developers necessary freedom for innovation. Use infrastructure as code and configuration management systems to deploy environments that are configured consistent with the controls present in production to ensure systems operate as expected when deployed. When environments are not in use, turn them off to avoid costs associated with idle resources (for example, development systems on evenings and weekends). Deploy production equivalent environments when load testing to enable valid results.
What is AWS CloudFormation?
How do I stop and start Amazon EC2 instances at regular intervals using AWS Lambda?

Make frequent, small, reversible changes

Make frequent, small, reversible changes: Frequent, small, and reversible changes reduce the scope and impact of a change. This eases troubleshooting, enables faster remediation, and provides the option to roll back a change. It also increases the rate at which you can deliver value to the business.

Fully automate integration and deployment

Use build and deployment management systems: Use build and deployment management systems to track and implement change, to reduce errors caused by manual processes, and reduce the level of effort. Fully automate the integration and deployment pipeline from code check-in through build, testing, deployment, and validation. This reduces lead time, enables increased frequency of change, and reduces the level of effort.
What is AWS CodeBuild?
Continuous integration best practices for software development
Slalom: CI/CD for serverless applications on AWS
Introduction to AWS CodeDeploy - automated software deployment with Amazon Web Services
What is AWS CodeDeploy?