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What are your favorite DevOps time-saving practices?
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Time is always tight and I'm looking for ways to optimize our workflows. What DevOps time-saving practices have made the biggest difference in your daily work?
I'm talking about automation scripts, tool integrations, or process improvements that actually save meaningful time. Things like automated infrastructure provisioning, self-service portals for developers, or anything that reduces manual toil.
Bonus points if you can share specific examples of how much time you saved and what tools you used.
My favorite DevOps time-saving practice is infrastructure as code with Terraform. What used to take days to provision manually now takes minutes. We have templates for common setups, and developers can spin up their own environments.
Another huge time saver was implementing self-service portals. Developers can deploy to staging, view logs, restart services, and check metrics without waiting for ops. This probably saves us 20+ hours per week in support requests.
Also, automated database migrations as part of our deployment pipeline. No more coordinating with DBAs or worrying about manual SQL scripts.
We saved tons of time by standardizing our toolchain. Every team uses the same logging solution (ELK stack), same monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana), same alerting (PagerDuty). No more context switching between different tools.
Another DevOps time-saving practice: automated dependency updates. We use Dependabot to automatically create PRs for dependency updates. Saves us from security vulnerabilities and reduces manual upgrade work.
Also, we created runbooks for common tasks and made them executable. Instead of reading a document and following steps, you run a script that does everything. This especially helps with onboarding new team members.
One DevOps time-saving practice that's often overlooked: optimizing your local development environment. We created a standardized dev container setup that includes all the tools and services developers need. What used to take a day to set up now takes 30 minutes.
We also implemented pre-commit hooks" that run tests, linting, and security checks before code is even committed. Catches issues early when they're cheaper to fix.
For infrastructure, we use spot instances for non-production environments. Cuts our cloud costs by about 60% and we automated the process of requesting and managing them.
From a productivity tools perspective, I'd add that integrating your DevOps tools with your communication platforms saves massive time. We have Slack bots that notify about deployments, incidents, and pipeline status. No more checking multiple dashboards.
Also, creating templates for common tasks. Need to set up a new microservice? Use our template that includes CI/CD configuration, monitoring, logging, and security scanning already set up. What used to take a week now takes a few hours.
And don't underestimate the time saved by good documentation. We use Sphinx to auto-generate documentation from code comments and configuration files. Always up to date, no manual documentation drift.
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