The New Era of DevOps – a Native Source Code Backup and Security Tools

Last Updated on March 8, 2024

Each company has different goals, but no matter what the industry, everyone has a few things in common. We certainly strive to maximize profits, but where should we start with? In many cases, optimization and automation will be the answer. “Automation is key” one may say.

In the field of new technologies, we must be aware that our source code is a business value. A measurable one and often a key value for our company. Our source code is our product. So this is where we should implement optimization and automation measures to either improve speed or facilitate the addition of new features. This is where our efforts should focus, and this is also where we should think about security.

The term DevOps is nothing new, it is even a certain standard currently. DevOps Engineer is a well-paid position at most IT companies. It is a person, or an entire department, responsible, for example, for preparing work environments, creating CI/CD pipelines, managing repositories, or monitoring infrastructure and stability of environments.

Current trends

The current trend in this field is migration to the cloud. This has actually been happening for a long time. As a result, monitoring and efficient deployment processes, as well as backup in CI/CD tools, are becoming more and more important here. And the latter is what we could call the new era of DevOps. This is where we should also think about the safety of our product. This is related to another concept – DevSecOps, which you can read more about here.

In short, it is just about adding the Security element to the well-known Development and Operations. What does that really mean? That safety becomes one of the pillars of properly functioning environments and pipelines.

Of course, this requires more and more knowledge from our specialists, but thanks to this we know that our business is safe, and in the event of a failure, all systems can be quickly restored to operation. This is not only a strictly technical aspect, such as having up-to-date backups but also efficient incident management, monitoring, and diagnosis tools, to identify problems as fast as possible.

Are you switching to a DevSecOps operation model? Remember to secure your code with the first professional GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, and Jira backup.

Automatic or on-demand source code backup 

To achieve this level of stability and operability, we need to be prepared. There is a saying – expect the unexpected. And in order to be ready to restore the system after an unexpected failure, of course, we must have both – data and source code backup. With GitProtect.io you can choose a predefined backup plan to instantly protect your GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab data, or create your own – fully customized to your organization’s needs. GitProtect gives you full control over retention, compression, backup window, start delay, and much more. All your backups run automatically. But that’s not all. There is also a backup on-demand option. You can as well, decide whether the copy you are running with the Basic scheme should be full, incremental, or made according to the scheduler settings. Thus, GitProtect gives you control over the type of manually triggered copy.

This way we can quickly and easily roll back our code to previous versions in the event of failure or human mistake.

Native source code backup

Since we are talking about new trends, it is also worth mentioning native source code backup. Let’s not limit ourselves only to the source code itself. We often use ready-made multi-platform solutions or libraries. Or we make our own publicly available. They can also have their backups – in the event of a failure or error, we can easily recover and make a working version available without the need to re-analyze it, compile it, etc.

In development processes, we can distinguish several stages for which we could introduce appropriate safety criteria and then monitor them at every step:

• DESIGN. Here, the relevant security policies and procedures. Could be as source code, and easy to backup.

• DEVELOPMENT. For example, tools integrated into dev environments. Analyzing certain operations and enabling the blocking of certain, potentially dangerous, behavior.

• TESTING. Here, for example, specific integration tests or scanning in order to find certain vulnerabilities of the tested software.

• DEPLOYMENT. Transparent deployment results to ensure that our security procedures and policies are met.

What about data?

It is also worth mentioning an obvious topic, i.e. data backup. Why am I mentioning it at all when talking about new trends? The idea is as old as the world, but we can always improve something. Likewise, we can extend the topic of data to include greater automation. Our CI/CD pipelines can catch any changes related to the data (e.g. scripts modifying the structure or content of the database) and run backup in CI/CD flow. We don’t have to rely only on scheduled actions – let’s react dynamically to what is happening with our project.

Summary

As you can see, we are fated on continuous development and improvement. Adding backup in CI/CD procedures is nothing special. On the other hand, it is still not common, and we should take care of it at every step of our software development. Dependence on cloud solutions and deployment to cloud environments and remote access requires us to take specific actions. Continuous monitoring, automation of solutions, and quick response to any problems are what we should now focus on and adjust to in our company.

The new era of DevOps is now. So be prepared and adapt.