As startups successfully navigate the early stages of growth and begin scaling their operations, their DevOps practices must evolve to accommodate increasing complexity and demand.

Implementing best practices in DevOps can help startups maintain agility, ensure reliable software delivery, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Here are some key DevOps best practices for startups to consider as they scale:

1. Embrace Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices, where your infrastructure is defined and managed through code, rather than manual configuration. This approach ensures consistency, repeatability, and version control for your infrastructure, enabling faster and more reliable provisioning and scaling.
2. Implement Services: Consider transitioning key parts of your infrastructure to services, where your application is broken down into smaller, independently deployable, and scalable parts. This modular approach promotes fault isolation and easier maintenance. It allows the heavy use or fault intolerant portions of your infrastructure to scale without everything else following suit.
3. Leverage Containerization and Orchestration: Containerize your applications and services using technologies like Docker, and implement container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). Containerization simplifies deployment, scaling, and portability, while orchestration enables automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. A key here is you can also deploy to your own hardware as well. Make sure you do the cost calculations between virtual cloud-based and your hardware.
4. Automate Everything: Automate as many processes as possible, including build, testing, deployment, monitoring, and scaling. Automation reduces human errors, increases efficiency, and allows teams to focus on more strategic tasks. If you have to do it more than three times, automate it.
5. Implement Continuous Delivery and Deployment: Adopt continuous delivery and deployment practices, where changes to your application are automatically built, tested, and deployed to production environments. This approach enables faster release cycles and reduces the risks associated with manual deployments.
6. Establish Comprehensive Monitoring and Observability: Implement robust monitoring and observability practices to gain visibility into your applications' performance, logs, metrics, and traces. This information is crucial for identifying and addressing issues promptly. It also will start you down the path to meeting some important SOC II rules.

It is very rare that is not a starting point, not an end.