The approach that these techniques follow may be different, but their common purpose of continuous iteration in software development remains unchanged. When followed religiously, these techniques can help a business refine its software, add innovative features without raising the risks and costs associated with making them, and accelerate the time to market.

All in all, CI/CD can transform a business – but there are many factors you should consider. In this detailed guide, we dive into continuous approaches and how they work.

UNDERSTANDING CI AND CD

A business’s approach to continuous improvement defines the relationship between CI and CD. And this relationship can be confusing at times as the CI/CD process is cyclical. That is why it is integral to decoding the differences between continuous deployment, continuous delivery, and continuous integration.

Continuous Integration

This phase primarily covers the initial stages of any software development and delivery pipeline. During the CI phase, the code is developed and is passed through initial testing cycles. Many developers work on a similar codebase at the same time, resulting in doing multiple commits frequently to the code repository.

Throughout the course of a project life cycle, a build’s delivery frequency can range from daily to many times a day. The fact that builds are frequent and small can reduce the level of risks involved in experimentation and can enable quick and simple rollbacks. When it comes to automation tools, CI uses plenty of them to create builds and perform initial testing – unit testing and sniff testing, for instance. Moreover, CI is noted for offering detailed and rapid feedback. And the limited nature of every single iteration in the CI phase means the bugs are located, notified, and corrected easily.

Eventually, CI ends whenever a build has successfully passed the initial testing phase and is all set to move to more comprehensive testing cycles. The preparation for passing the build to the next stage may include creating its deployable image – a virtual machine or container image – that can be made available for the testing staff.

Continuous Delivery

This part of the pipeline gets activated from where CI has left. CD primarily focuses on the more advanced stages of a pipeline. In this phase, the build that has successfully completed the CI pipeline is tested, validated, and finally delivered for the deployment phase. It is also possible to deploy a fully tested and validated build in the continuous delivery phase, too – but there is no hard-and-fast rule regarding this.

However, continuous delivery relies on automation tools to put a build via advanced testing phases, including configuration, user acceptance, and function. Passing a build through these testing phases helps validate that it meets all the set requirements and is ready to be deployed in the production phase.

Once again, mini incremental iterations ensure that problems get discovered in the testing phase early on and are rectified at speed. This approach to identifying errors is way more economical than the ones followed by conventional software development processes.

Continuous Deployment

This phase shares its steps with the ones found in the continuous delivery part of the software development pipeline. The key difference between deployment and delivery is that the deployment phase is responsible for deploying every validated build to the production phase automatically. When compared with the deployment phase, the delivery phase is only responsible for manually staging the validated build.

The best part about continuous deployment is that it ends the constant monitoring of release dates. Moreover, if done properly, the deployment phase accelerates the loop of customer feedback and minimizes the stress on development and operations teams. With continuous deployment, developers can build the software code and see it getting executed in the production phase barely minutes after completion.

Additionally, continuous deployment is a challenge to implement. Doing continuous deployment requires you to automate every stage of the process. For that purpose, your business will have to invest in building a robust suite of automated testing tools – Jenkins, Selenium, SonarQube, Appium, and Apache JMeter. Most importantly, a business that wants to excel in continuous deployment needs to create a culture of continuous improvement that enables quick detection and fast response to production bottlenecks.

IMPROVE CI/CD OUTCOMES WITH FLEXSIN 

As a trusted DevOps consulting partner, we helped businesses accelerate digital innovation. We have expertise in optimizing software development pipelines, achieving remarkable production stability, and automating delivery. Our DevOps practice is backed by our capabilities of working with different tools for version control, cloud infrastructure automation, CI/CD pipeline, serverless computing, testing, containers and orchestrators, and more. Connect with our DevOps engineers to get a unified experience to build, test, implement, and scale applications.

The DevOps Challenges Explained

Breaking The Dev Vs. Ops Mentality

In most enterprises, the culture dictates that a development team will toss the code to a centralized operations team. In this model, the developers pull out all the stops to innovate and make new changes at speed while the operations team maintains high service levels. That is why the objectives of these two groups often run counter to one another. And whenever that happens, friction points are created. These frictions, in turn, result in complicated handovers, rising costs, and lengthy feedback loops.

IT enterprises that embrace the DevOps culture break down the siloes and enable the development and operations teams to collaborate together. The DevOps journey, however, begins with setting out a clear vision of how this practice will work for your business. For example, a robust DevOps model will always demarcate where the development team should stop and the operations team should spring into action. Besides, a good DevOps model will always find out innovative ways for integrating the development and operations teams together. If a business builds and deploys such a model, it will overcome the roadblocks that companies usually face when they are beginning their DevOps journeys.

Disseminating Clarity About Continuous Delivery Practices

Now, your business knows the importance of delivering the code continually for minimizing feedback loops. Even your engineers have started deploying pipelines and leveraging continuous integration (CI) tooling. After all, they are the only tools that will help your business unlock a culture of continuous delivery (CD). But, now, you have to ask yourself a million-dollar question. Do the feature teams in your business understand what it means to deliver software or any digital product continuously inside a predefined environment at a great velocity? The fact is that many businesses have their own set of definitions of what CD means. For most businesses that truly understand and embrace DevOps, though, CD includes a set of processes.

When a business follows these processes, it will roll out new software changes reliably and sustainably. These changes generally everything from new features and updates to bug fixes and more. Besides, embracing CD also means that your development team’s changes must never put a dent in the main project; that is, the project should always be in a deployable state. That way, your teams will verify whether your project is in a clean, workable state before they begin deploying it to the production ecosystem. That is why having a clear definition of CD is important. When all the stakeholders know what CD means, they will establish a common understanding of this process’s goals. Resultantly, a clear understanding of CD will help businesses form a roadmap for achieving the established goals without hampering the project’s stability.

Migrating From Legacy Architectures To Microservices

Maintaining older architectures and infrastructures with complicated technology stacks can be challenging, even if they have served your business for years. Moreover, thinking of maintaining the status quo can also pave the way for multiple stability problems, increasing operational costs, and lack of support. The result? Your business will be overpowered by its competition. However, when you use Infrastructure as Code along with microservices, you take a strong step toward creating a culture of continuous innovation.

That way, your development and operations teams will eventually reinvent and modernize the product development lifecycle from end to end. Resultantly, businesses will be able to adapt to evolving customer and market needs at an incredible speed. Moreover, embracing a cloud-native ecosystem along with the microservices architecture can unlock an era of quicker innovation and high-speed development. Additionally, it is important to create solid business foundations around configuration management, automation, and CD practices. That is how an IT enterprise will handle the high operational workloads that microservices usually bring to the table.

Deploying A Fully Functional Test Automation Strategy

Your enterprise may already be aware of the importance of automated tests. Besides, automated tests also enable the foundation of the DevOps practice, comprising CI/CD. That is why your business must never slow down its quest for achieving the peak of test automation. In your quest to refine test automation, you should not just say what the test strategy is. Instead, you must move a step forward and do a sample implementation of that very strategy. That is how you will give your teams a strong north star that will guide them to embrace and advocate test automation.

When your business is following test automation, it will have to answer three critical questions, including:

• How should you do data management for the automation tests?
• Can your team bring best practices and open-sourced shared libraries?
• What should a crackerjack test look like for your business’s codebase?
• What should be the outcomes of your smoke tests?

The idea is that your business should have an understanding of how to implement the test automation strategy first. This way, you will make sure that test automation is embraced across your organization. And once test automation is adopted across the board, your teams will minimize the feedback loops, enabling them to get the product into the market at velocity.

Focusing Too Heavily On Tools

The prospects of embracing DevOps across your enterprise can bring the possibility of working with flashy new tools. Most businesses that do not have experience with DevOps believe that these tools will help them solve all the development and ops challenges under the sun. However, when your business introduces a suite of new tools to accelerate the pace of DevOps transformation, it will have to train its staff, too. Not to mention, such a business will also have to recheck whether these tools meet different security requirements and are seamlessly integrated within the current technology infrastructure.

Deciding all these factors, however, will easily divert your attention from a key priority of your business: your team. Your organization structure and your team are key to maximizing DevOps benefits. Whenever you have the right DevOps structure in place, your team processes will follow. And once these processes are set in stone, your business can then determine the tools. The tools that you shortlist and invest in after doing a complete analysis are required to accelerate how your business meets these processes. Moreover, the people in your development and ops teams are also integral to the process of transitioning to DevOps. That is, if the people on your team are not trained to use DevOps tools and processes, then there will be a lot of confusion. And, eventually, this confusion will slow down the pace of embracing different DevOps practices.

Collaborating With A DevOps Partner

Of course, the process of adopting the DevOps mindset and continuously deploying it in your development and operations teams is challenging. If your business lacks experience with DevOps, then it will need a trusted technology partner to guide it.

We are a global technology partner that has helped SMEs and enterprises accelerate the pace of DevOps transformation. From conception to strategy building and deployment, our engineers have the expertise to help you win with DevOps. Our DevOps expertise is complemented by our experience in working with proprietary clouds, such as Salesforce, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and SAP.

Connect with our DevOps developer now and discover how this practice will help you create a culture of continuous, high-speed integration and delivery for your customers.

Ideally, DevOps showcases the process of blending two disciplines of development and operations into a single, continuous process. With the proliferation of elastic cloud architectures, DevOps has taken center stage again. That is why we bring you this explainer blog. Here, we will explain what DevOps is, how it works, and what its benefits are.

DevOps Decoded

DevOps unifies processes, people, and technology to deliver continual value to customers at velocity. The DevOps model comprises practices, tools, and cultural philosophies that boost an enterprise’s agility to respond to seismic business shifts.

DevOps practice helps unify siloed roles, including IT operations, development, security, and quality control. That is how this practice helps teams collaborate better and faster to improve business outcomes.

Integrating the DevOps culture into corporate DNA helps teams build capabilities to respond to evolving customer needs. DevOps also helps businesses build confidence in the products and services they make. That is how this practice helps accelerate an enterprise’s journey toward business transformation.

The Working Of DevOps

When your business adopts the DevOps way of working, its development and operations teams are not siloed anymore. Some businesses even merge these two teams into one single team where the engineers work to optimize the existing software development lifecycle (SDLC).

DevOps practices influence all the phases of an SDLC, from development and testing to deployment and operations. That way, embracing this cultural philosophy helps teams build breadth of skills instead of focusing on one particular function.

Moreover, a few DevOps models will also bring security teams and quality assurance people, too. So, when you see DevOps include security and quality, it is known as DevSecOps. A DevSecOps team will integrate practices into business models for automating legacy processes that have been slow, manual, and costly.

A DevOps team will use a leading-edge technology stack and tooling. This way, the team will evolve and operate applications reliably and quickly. The suite of DevOps tools used will help engineers accomplish tasks, such as provisioning infrastructure or deploying codes, independently. Normally, the execution of these tasks requires an incredible level of dependence. So, if tasks can be handled by teams independently, it will eventually improve a team’s velocity.

The DevOps Edge

High Velocity

When your business integrates the DevOps culture into its business models, it will innovate faster and serve customers better. Better yet, DevOps even helps businesses respond to changes faster. Businesses that prioritize DevOps grow more efficient at improving the quality of and accelerating the pace of business outcomes. Getting a tailored DevOps model to serve a business’s development and operations executives will help them achieve better results at an astonishing speed. For instance, key DevOps practices, including continuous delivery and microservices, help teams take ownership of the deliverable and release updates quicker and more consistently.
Accelerated Delivery

Once DevOps practices are implemented into a development lifecycle, they will accelerate release delivery. That means imbibing this philosophy will help boost innovation ROI and improve the existing portfolio faster. In the real world, imagine a business releasing bug fixes and new features lightning fast. That is what DevOps principles do for a business, provided that the organization is truly practicing it. On top of that, businesses that follow this practice will respond to customer needs faster and build a competitive edge for themselves. Few other DevOps practices that automate software releases, from build to deployment, include Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).

Increased Dependability

Following this philosophy helps teams ensure sustained application quality at all times. When your business upholds DevOps principles, it will make its development lifecycle dependable despite infrastructural changes. That is how this philosophy makes sure a business reliably delivers at a rapid pace, all the while maintaining a positive UX for users. For example, a business can leverage CI and CD to make sure that every change is safe and functional at all times. Likewise, other DevOps practices, such as monitoring and logging, will help stakeholders stay in the know about performance optimization.

Improved Scalability

Businesses will always want to manage development processes and infrastructure models at an incredible scale. To that end, enterprises embrace DevOps because this philosophy focuses on consistency and automation. With consistency and automation, a business team will be better equipped to manage always-evolving and complex systems efficiently while minimizing the risks. For instance, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables enterprises to manage testing, production ecosystems, and development pipelines repeatedly and effectively.

Continued Collaboration

Team-building and collaboration go to the next level with a DevOps cultural model. Whenever a business makes DevOps its foundation, it will foster values such as accountability and ownership among its teams. Besides, DevOps is built to let disparate teams, such as developers and operations, collaborate better and faster and share multiple responsibilities. Similarly, DevOps helps blend workflows as well. That way, a business will definitely bring down inefficiencies and save time. For example, DevOps can dramatically reduce handover periods that usually happen between the development team and operations executives.

Robust Security

Businesses often find it challenging to move at a blazing fast speed without preserving compliance and managing control. However, DevOps makes a world of difference if an enterprise is facing similar challenges. A DevOps model helps enterprises automate compliance policies without giving up security. This philosophy helps businesses adopt next-level configuration management processes and fine-grained controls. For instance, harnessing IaC and policy as code can help keep track of compliance at a tremendous scale.

Getting Started With DevOps

DevOps enables enterprises to build transformational capabilities that will make them digital-ready. But including DevOps into a company culture properly and continually is easier said than done. That is why having a trusted SaaS partner to help you integrate DevOps and DevSecOps into your business model is absolutely necessary.

At Flexsin, we are the SaaS partner that can help your business experience DevOps-enabled growth at speed. We have a team of application managers, cybersecurity experts, AWS and Azure cloud architects, and site reliability engineers under one roof.

Our expertise in fast-tracking and streamlining implementation has positioned us as one of the top DevOps companies. Our DevOps as a Service model has helped businesses optimize costs, strengthen security, boost performance, ensure reliability, and accelerate automation.

Connect with one of our experts today and discover how DevOps will help your business scale at speed.

If you think your business can put DevOps on the back burner, it is missing the point. The fact is that customers today expect enterprises to roll out enhanced business capabilities. That way, enterprises will not only serve their customers better but also become relevant in today’s always-on digital world. And DevOps can help you get there at an astonishing velocity.

But enterprises should move beyond establishing a DevOps mindset. Instead, teams should implement DevOps practices across their PDLCs and truly bring this philosophy to life. Better yet, DevOps practices help fast-track, improve, and automate specific phases of the PDLCs, enabling organizations to adopt continuous evolution at their pace. On the other hand, some of these practices may span different phases of a PDLC, empowering teams to create a seamless and optimized process that boosts productivity.

In this explainer, we will give you a rundown on DevOps practices that you should deploy throughout your PDLC. Let us get started.

DevOps Practices That Matter

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION AND CONTINUOUS DELIVERY (CI/CD)

Continuous Integration or CI is focused on the development phase that features creating and testing code. It is fully automated. Every time you commit code, the changes will be validated and merged in the master branch. Eventually, the code will be packed inside a build artifact. On the contrary, continuous delivery or CD streamlines the delivery phrase. Under CD, every time a fresh build artifact is made available, it is automatically positioned inside the desired ecosystem and deployed.

The two DevOps practices are big on automation. These two practices ensure high-quality code delivery to customers at the speed they want. Continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery help automate aspects of the product development and delivery phases. Every practice takes automation a step further, and it all begins with continuous integration. Moreover, these practices help the development executives to roll out a new feature, fix bugs, and carry out other enhancements at a tremendous speed and accuracy.

VERSION CONTROL

This DevOps practice helps manage code in different versions. Whenever a development team adopts this practice, it finds that tracking revisions and modifying the history will simplify code review and recovery. Development teams leverage different version control ecosystems, including Git, to implement this practice. These systems enable developers to collaborate effectively in authoring code.

Besides, these systems offer a crystal-clear process to merge code changes that happen within the same files. That way, it will be easier to handle conflicts and undo changes to earlier versions. Version control is one of the fundamental DevOps practices, enabling development teams to collaborate, divide coding tasks among team members, and store code for quick and simple recovery whenever required. Last, version control is integral to the success of other practices, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI.

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Agile is an important part of the product development approach. This philosophy underscores the value of user and customer feedback, team collaboration, and incredibly high responsiveness to change. And Agile manages to do all of this by shortening the release cycle. Teams that follow Agile provide continual changes and deliver visible improvements to customers, gather their feedback, and adjust the product quality or development process according to their needs.
Moreover, Agile is different from other traditional frameworks, such as Waterfall, that focus on long release cycles. And these release cycles, in turn, are marked by sequential phases. For your information, Scrum and Kanban are also two common frameworks that are closely linked with the Agile methodology.

INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE

IaC that expands to Infrastructure as Code defines different topologies and system resources descriptively. That is how the development teams are allowed to manage the resources, just like the way developers would manage code repositories. Better yet, these definitions can be easily stored and versioned inside multiple version control ecosystems. These systems will help teams review the resources and topologies and return them to a previous state, similar to the way developers do with code.

Following IaC empowers teams to deploy system resources in a repeatable, controlled, and reliable way. This practice automates the deployment process and minimizes the risk of errors, especially for complicated large-scale ecosystems. This is a reliable solution for environment deployments that thrive on iterations. Embracing IaC also enables teams to maintain development and testing ecosystems that are similar to production. Eventually, duplicating these ecosystems to multiple cloud platforms and data centers becomes more efficient and simpler.

CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

This practice is all about managing the state of different system resources, comprising databases, virtual machines, and severs. Leveraging configuration management tools, development teams can launch changes in a systematic, controlled way. That way, the team will bring down the risk of modifying different system configurations.

Development teams should harness multiple configuration management tools for tracking the system state and for helping minimize configuration drifts. The avoidance of drifts becomes all the more important, given the fact that the configuration of system resources often deviates from the desired state with time. When configuration management is teamed with IaC, both configuration and system definition will become simple to automate and templatize. In the end, that is how teams will be ready to operate in complex environments at a tremendous scale.

CONTINUOUS MONITORING

Continuous monitoring means getting the capability to have real-time, complete visibility into the health and performance of the technology stack used for building a product. This stack comprises the information on the underlying infrastructure that powers the product to its high-level software components.

The visibility control includes a group of metadata and telemetry along with setting alerts for multiple predefined conditions. These conditions, in turn, demand the attention of the operator. On the other hand, telemetry features logs and event data gathered from different parts of the system. These datasets are stored in a place where they can be queried and analyzed at speed. High-performance DevOps specialists make sure that they set meaningful, actionable alerts and gather rich telemetry. That way, these specialists draw insights from vast enterprise data lakes. Last but not least, these insights will also enable development teams to resolve issues in real time and discover the way forward for improving the product in future development lifecycles.

Unleashing Continuous Evolution For Your Enterprise With DevOps

Knowing DevOps practices is one thing, but implementing them and measuring their success rates pose a different challenge. If your business is unsure how to go about integrating the DevOps culture and deploying its practice, then now is the time to get a global technology leader on board.

A trusted global technology leader, we have years of experience in the development, operations, cybersecurity, and testing domains. Owing to our excellent track record, we have refined our DevOps practice for market-leading startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Our DevOps-as-a-Service model has helped businesses deploy new software at speed continuously. Besides, the speed of software delivery does not mean the end product’s quality will take a hit. Instead, our DevOps developers ensure that the product delivery is made with fewer failures and rollbacks.

Our engineers have expertise in working with different technology stacks that support businesses to embrace DevOps confidently and quickly. We have deep expertise in a DevOps technology stack, comprising Puppet, PowerShell, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Ansible, GitHub, Capistrano, Docker, and more.

Thanks to our technical capabilities, we have helped businesses:

• Optimize their PDLCs with continuous integration
• Accelerate deployment process with continuous deployment
• Engineer a development vector with continuous feedback
• Use release management to streamline the release process from end to end
• Leverage automated platforms and tools to assemble and manage different systems
• Measure everything that is important in PDLCs with continuous improvement
• Strengthen their security posture with advanced DevSecOps practices

Connect with one of our DevOps engineers today and uncover the process of aligning the speed of product development with the pace of doing business.