What are Day 2 operations?
A lot of the dialogue about application lifecycles revolves around design and deployment. The reason for this is simple: It’s impossible to build robust applications without a meticulous design, and it’s impossible for that design to come to life without meticulous execution.
However, there’s a third and equally important aspect of software development and operations that often flies under the radar: the continuous maintenance and optimization of deployed applications, otherwise known as Day-2 operations.
Without solid Day 2 ops, all the hard work of application design and deployment can become undone, and any benefits provided by newly developed and cutting-edge software can be undercut. Conversely, by prioritizing Day 2 operations, DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers (SREs) can guarantee application performance and stability, ultimately enriching the entire application lifecycle.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the world of Day 2 operations, providing a detailed definition, key components, common challenges, best practices, and state-of-the-art Day 2 operations tools. Let’s jump in.
Learn More: Automating Day 2 Operations with Quali Torque
Day 2 operations are a critical phase in the software delivery lifecycle. It’s also the longest phase, involving managing, monitoring, and improving applications that have already been deployed. To fully understand Day 2 operations, you need to know what precedes it.
With the emergence and proliferation of DevOps methodologies, Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 ops have come to be enmeshed and often overlap. So let’s take a quick look at Day 0 and Day 1 operations.
Day 0 operations
Day 0 operations are the preliminary phase of an application lifecycle. It involves planning and designing software applications.
Critical Day 0 activities include designing the application’s architecture and pipeline, understanding its implications on the overall development infrastructure, identifying tooling requirements, allocating budgets and resources, and establishing a delivery timeline.
Day 1 operations
Next comes Day 1 operations, which many know as the deployment phase of a software delivery pipeline. In other words, Day 1 operations involve deploying the design created in Day 0 operations.
Critical Day 1 activities include building the application pipeline, installing software development infrastructure, activating and using toolchains, and eventually deploying applications in phased rollouts.
Day 2 operations
This brings us to Day 2 operations, a phase typically handled by DevOps engineers and SREs. Day 2 operations may not be the most creative phase of the software lifecycle, but they’re crucial nonetheless.
Day 2 operations are all about ensuring consistent, robust, and seamless performance and optimizing costs. It also involves reinforcing key application attributes like security, availability, scalability, flexibility, and user experience.
Key components of Day 2 operations
The following are some of the most important activities of Day 2 ops.
Monitoring and logging
Once an application has been deployed, it’s important to monitor it and log any findings. This helps identify bugs, solve inconsistencies, discover the root cause of issues, and ensure continuous improvement across the software delivery pipeline.
Assessing application performance
A major part of Day 2 operations involves closely assessing how an application runs to see if it deviates from its original design. The simple question SREs try to answer is, “Is the application running as planned?” If the answer is no, then updates or new iterations must be developed.
Managing runtime configuration and settings
Complex live application environments are susceptible to configuration drift, which occurs when an application’s configuration settings drift too far from established baselines. A core element of Day 2 operations involves monitoring runtime configurations closely to catch configuration drift before it escalates.
Performing security patches and updates
Security is one of the main pillars of Day 2 operations, so it’s crucial to keep applications up-to-date. Unpatched applications can be a hotbed for security vulnerabilities, which can lead to debilitating cyber incidents.
Maintaining governance and compliance
Maintaining a robust governance and compliance posture is a perpetual Day 2 task. Compliance requirements and baselines are established during Day 0 operations, and it’s vital to ensure adherence to these during Day 2 ops. Even small compliance slipups can have long-lasting repercussions.
Conducting maintenance activities
Day 2 operations involve numerous housekeeping activities like performing backups, updating software, and assessing and optimizing resource utilization. These tasks are key to maintaining performance and availability in runtime environments.
Managing and leveraging data for iterative improvements
The key to making strong and sustainable improvements lies in embracing a metrics-driven approach. This makes managing vast volumes of data and using the right metrics paramount in Day 2 operations.
Responding to incidents
In modern cloud-based runtime environments, incidents are not a possibility but an inevitability. Preparing and responding to incidents, downtime, and other disruptions are two critical Day 2 ops tasks for DevOps engineers and SREs. The quicker incidents are dealt with, the more uptime and availability an application has.
Leveraging proactive capacity planning
This crucial component of Day 2 operations involves leveraging predictive analytics to ensure that application workload demands never exceed existing resources and infrastructure. “Proactive” is the key word here: It’s important to anticipate and plan for workload spikes to avoid outages and performance drops.
Optimizing the software development lifecycle continuously
Continuous optimization of the application delivery pipeline is an overarching objective of Day 2 operations. Many of the above-mentioned points can be summarized as one large goal: to make application production and runtime environments as robust as possible and ensure that improvements to one don’t detrimentally affect the other.
Common challenges of Day 2 operations
Now that we’ve covered the core components of Day 2 operations, let’s take a look at some of the most pressing challenges posed by this phase of the application lifecycle.
Gaining complete visibility into complex application environments
Application infrastructure has never been as complicated as it is today, which means DevOps engineers and SREs often have to deal with convoluted architectures. This often leads to blind spots that harbor inefficiencies, vulnerabilities, and other bugs, which can impact the entire software delivery pipeline.
Managing security vulnerabilities
Application environments are often rife with security vulnerabilities like suboptimal access controls, insecure APIs, data exposure, and misconfigurations. The sheer volume of security challenges today can overwhelm DevOps teams and SREs, resulting in a cascade of long-lasting repercussions.
Navigating complex cross-region regulations
One of the most arduous Day 2 responsibilities is untangling and adhering to the complex compliance obligations of different countries and industries. Furthermore, to maintain a strong governance posture, it’s essential to meet data sovereignty requirements.
Dealing with tool sprawl and silos
Application management tools are immensely useful for executing Day 2 actions. However, in some cases, the uncontrolled commissioning of application management tools can result in tool sprawl. Furthermore, if SREs and DevOps engineers are using too many disparate tools, it can result in silos and ineffective or incomplete Day-2 actions.
Tracking iterative changes accurately
Continuous iterative improvement is the secret to efficient software pipelines and runtime environments. Due to the high-octane nature of contemporary DevOps environments, it can be easy to lose track of iterative changes. If teams need to revert to a previous version of an application but can’t easily find it, it may lead to chaos.
Staying on top of configuration drift
Although configuration drift is a common phenomenon, addressing it is not always straightforward. In cloud-based application environments, there are so many moving parts that discovering every asset, let alone ascertaining their configuration settings, is a major challenge.
Orienting to decentralized application management
In pre-DevOps eras, the majority of Day 2 actions were conducted by centralized IT personnel. However, as DevOps promotes decentralized development models and philosophies like “you build it, you run it,” there’s been an increased need to ensure that Day 2 operations evolve into distributed and autonomous actions across the application pipeline.
Managing time-consuming and manual tasks
Day 2 operations often include complex and lengthy processes and actions. These actions can put undue stress on SREs and DevOps personnel and eventually lead to developer burnout; it can also result in human errors that can affect security, compliance, and cloud cost efficiency.
Maintaining consistency of Day 2 actions
A common issue that SREs and DevOps engineers face during Day 2 operations is maintaining the consistency of Day 2 actions. If a well-executed action, like restarting a cloud instance or assessing the health of an application, is not easily repeatable, it can significantly slow down Day 2 ops and lead to widespread inefficiencies.
Tracking changes, activities, and actions
Day 2 operations are a busy phase in the software lifecycle, making it hard to stay on top of various changes and activities. Without a streamlined way to track Day 2 operations, DevOps engineers and SREs will have a fractured understanding of what goes on in their application environments.
Maintaining documentation and ensuring knowledge transfer
For effective long-term management and optimization of live application environments, it’s important to collect and catalog documentation. A meticulous paper trail is integral to knowledge transfer, especially regarding details related to application environment maintenance, toolchains, and other day-to-day application management actions.
Controlling exorbitant cloud expenses
Cloud computing provides many cost-related benefits. However, without diligent optimization during Day 2 ops, cloud spend can get out of control fast, with new cloud services being deployed at the drop of a hat. Additionally, suboptimal Day-2 workflows and processes add to costs via wasted resources and various inefficiencies.
Best practices for Day 2 operations
The following recommendations will help boost and streamline your Day 2 operations.
Focus on iterative improvements
When it comes to optimizing runtime environments, it’s best to take small steps. While attempting sweeping changes may be alluring, such approaches introduce new complexities and risks.
The key to Day 2 operations is to roll out improvements in small but frequent batches.
This constant improvement (of the same codebase) is central to the DevOps methodology. Iterative approaches ensure continuous optimization without overwhelming infrastructure, teams, and resource pools.
Embrace an Environment as Code approach
The Environment as Code approach, another important element of DevOps, involves defining and provisioning all components of the application as code, including infrastructure, applications, data, and other services.
In Day 2 operations, this scalable technique is particularly useful because it enables easier duplication and more efficient version control. By providing a single definition of the entire application environment, engineering teams can reduce the scope of Day 2 operations and understand the impact on other components of the application.
Define routine Day 2 actions as code
To automate Day 2 operations, you have to define them as code.
For example, consider common Day 2 activities like generating a temporary access token, starting/stopping/deleting database servers, and pausing/resuming Kubernetes clusters. Instead of repeating the same action again and again, it’s more productive to define it as code.
This way, if a user, developer, or engineer needs to access a certain application development or management service, all they need to do is invoke the corresponding Day 2 action that has been defined as code.
Automate Day 2 actions
Once Day 2 actions are defined as code, it’s time to automate them. Automating Day 2 operations can make the entire application ecosystem faster, safer, and easier to work within.
High-level benefits include higher-quality applications and streamlined development pipelines. SREs and DevOps engineers benefit as well, as this automation frees them up from repetitive and manual tasks, enabling them to focus on the more creative, intuitive, and human-centered aspects of software development.
Implement automation triggers
Automating Day 2 actions is only part of the puzzle. The next step involves establishing triggers to define when an automated workflow or action gets activated. There are a few different ways to implement automation triggers.
DevOps teams can create triggers to automate specific Day 2 actions once a day or at a specific time. These are known as cron-based triggers. Teams can also build triggers that are event-based, which means an automated Day 2 action will be initiated when a specific event like configuration drift or an environment update is detected.
Archive Day 2 actions meticulously
DevOps engineers and SREs need to have complete control over Day 2 ops to be effective. This means knowing exactly what Day 2 actions have been executed, when, why, and by whom.
Having easy access to this information allows engineers to respond to issues, identify older iterations, and map improvements more quickly and efficiently. This is especially important in dynamic DevOps environments, where iterative improvements, actions, and changes can often be done haphazardly and then lost due to suboptimal archiving.
Schedule consistent recurring actions
While it’s easy to focus on the more advanced aspects of Day 2 operations, teams should never forget the basics. That’s why it’s crucial to establish consistent recurring actions—the bread and butter of Day 2 ops. This way, critical Day 2 processes don’t get relegated because of other complex incidents and events.
Scheduling consistent actions allows DevOps engineers and SREs to establish a strong Day 2 baseline to build upon.
Set up single-click Day 2 actions
Lastly, teams must be able to execute Day 2 actions across application environments with just a few clicks. That way, any important Day 2 action that involves optimizing performance, security, availability, or user experience won’t be delayed because of convoluted workflows.
By introducing single-click execution, any SRE or DevOps team member can conduct and validate critical Day 2 actions in seconds.
Tools for streamlining Day 2 operations
SREs and DevOps teams will need to leverage specialized tools for Day 2 operations. Below, we list the various tool categories, with examples for each one.
- Monitoring: Assess runtime environments and deployed applications to evaluate performance and identify issues; e.g., Prometheus and Grafana.
- Log management: Document events, actions, and activities that occur across application environments; e.g., ELK Stack and Splunk.
- Cloud cost management: Utilize monitoring and analytics capabilities to provide insights on cloud expenses and cost optimization; e.g., CloudHealth by VMware, AWS Cost Explorer, and Quali Torque.
- CI/CD: Construct robust CI/CD pipelines for DevOps teams to continuously develop, test, and launch new software; e.g., Jenkins and GitLab CI.
- Application performance monitoring: Check whether applications are functioning well and as designed via telemetry data; e.g. New Relic and Datadog.
- Infrastructure automation and provisioning: Benefit from the automated provisioning of critical application infrastructure via reusable and scalable templates; e.g., Quali Torque and Terraform.
- Orchestration: Leverage AI to optimally configure and mobilize various infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes, and application resources; e.g., Quali Torque and Kubernetes.
- Configuration management: Establish and track the configuration settings of all application resources, assets, and systems; e.g., Ansible and Puppet.
- Application security: Scan software and code for bugs and vulnerabilities and remediate uncovered risks; e.g., SonarQube and OWASP ZAP.
- Ticketing: Track, route, and resolve issues by generating tickets and sending them to the right teams; e.g., Jira and Zendesk.
Summary
Day 2 operations are essential to optimize application performance, security, compliance, availability, and a whole range of other essential attributes. However, to conduct effective Day-2 actions, SREs and DevOps engineers need the assistance of an end-to-end infrastructure platform. That’s where Quali Torque comes in.
Quali Torque has a slew of exciting features that can simplify, streamline, and optimize Day 2 ops. With Quali Torque, teams can embrace the environment-as-code approach, automate Day 2 actions, and set up cron- and event-based triggers to activate them.
Quali Torque is also optimal for scheduling critical processes and introducing single-click ad hoc Day 2 actions to make life easy for engineers.
It optimizes live environment efficiency, making sure that developers, engineers, and other personnel don’t get bogged down by repetitive and manual Day-2 actions. Powered by AI-driven automation, orchestration, and infrastructure provisioning capabilities, Quali Torque serves as the cornerstone of robust Day 2 operations.
Want to see how Quali Torque can boost your Day 2 ops? Visit our playground now.