The goal of a DevOps pipeline is to create a continuous workflow that includes the entire application lifecycle. But too often, people focus only on the tools and automating everything, not stopping to think whether their processes could further improve performance and efficiency. Let's look at some common challenges to continuous delivery and then learn five tips for refining your DevOps pipeline and taking it to the next level.

Containerization has replaced virtual machines to a great extent because containers are lightweight and make efficient use of the OS kernel. Docker’s efficient nature helps with software development, testing, delivery, and deployment in a DevOps environment, and all the benefits of Docker also apply to Kubernetes. Let’s explore some of the additional agile and DevOps benefits you can gain by using Kubernetes.

Fixing a bug in one area of the software may break something in another area. To detect whether defects have been introduced, we need to perform regression testing—executing certain test cases again to see whether a change has affected other existing features. But how do you make time for another testing cycle prior to every production release? You need to get QA involved earlier in the software development lifecycle.

DevOps does speed up your processes and make them more efficient, but companies must focus on quality as well as speed. QA should not live outside the DevOps environment; it should be a fundamental part. If your DevOps ambitions have started with only the development and operations teams, it’s not too late to loop in testing. You must integrate QA into the lifecycle in order to truly achieve DevOps benefits.