How do you handle system maintenance and updates in devops without disrupting service delivery?

1 Plan and schedule

The first step is to plan and schedule your system maintenance and updates carefully. You should assess the impact, scope, and priority of each task, and communicate with your stakeholders and users about the expected changes and outcomes. You should also choose a suitable time window, preferably during low traffic or off-peak hours, and avoid overlapping or conflicting updates that might affect the same components or dependencies.

2 Automate and test

The second step is to automate and test your system maintenance and updates as much as possible. You should use tools and scripts that can perform the tasks efficiently, consistently, and accurately, and that can also roll back or recover in case of failures. You should also test your updates in a separate environment, such as a staging or sandbox, before applying them to the production environment. This way, you can verify the functionality, performance, and compatibility of your updates, and catch any bugs or issues before they affect your service delivery.

3 Monitor and evaluate

The third step is to monitor and evaluate your system maintenance and updates after applying them to the production environment. You should use metrics and feedback to measure the results and outcomes of your tasks, and to identify any problems or anomalies that might occur. You should also review and document your processes and lessons learned, and use them to improve your future system maintenance and updates.

4 Minimize and mitigate

The fourth step is to minimize and mitigate the disruption caused by your system maintenance and updates. To reduce downtime, errors, or conflicts, consider using blue-green deployment, which involves having two identical environments and switching between them when updating. Additionally, you can employ a canary release to roll out updates to a small subset of users or servers first and gradually expanding to the rest. Lastly, feature flags allow you to use conditional logic to enable or disable certain features or functionalities of your service based on criteria such as user segments, time, or location in order to control the availability and visibility of your updates.

5 Collaborate and learn

The fifth step is to collaborate and learn from your system maintenance and updates. Involving your devops team and other stakeholders in the planning, execution, and evaluation of tasks can help foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and feedback. Consider using tools and platforms like ChatOps, DevOps dashboards, and post-mortems to facilitate communication, coordination, and documentation. ChatOps can streamline workflows while DevOps dashboards can track progress, performance, and issues. Post-mortems can help analyze root causes, impacts, and solutions of any incidents or failures that may occur. This way, you can learn from your mistakes, celebrate successes, and implement corrective actions.

6 Adapt and improve

The sixth step is to adapt and improve your system maintenance and updates based on your experience, feedback, and changing needs. You should continuously monitor and evaluate your system performance, reliability, and security, and identify any gaps, opportunities, or threats that might require your attention. You should also embrace change and innovation, and adopt new tools, methods, or practices that can enhance your system maintenance and updates, and ultimately, your service delivery.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?