DevOps Consulting and Implementation Using Continuous Delivery

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DevOps are used to automate and standardize the processes to create an integrated approach to deliver software and transform the customer experience. DevOps help enterprises in improving their efficiency, deployment quality, and speeding up innovation to focus better on their business goals. Dev usually refers to the developers or all the people involved in the project, while Ops encompasses a wide range of team members such as system engineers, operations staff, network engineers, and many other titles. DevOps comes from agile software development to keep up with the increased software velocity the agile methods have helped achieve. But what is Agile Development? It is an umbrella term for several software development methodologies. Though each of the methodologies is unique in its approach, they all have a common vision and core values, which are to incorporate iteration and use the continuous feedback provided to refine and deliver a better software system. There are many DevOps consulting companies in today’s market. They use Continuous Delivery to automate deployments and provide stability to the existing software systems. This, in turn, will reduce the costs of testing and deployment, the delays caused to business due to ineffective code; disrupt the software bugs and increasing the productivity to enable the team to keep up with the increasing business needs of the enterprise. Continuous Delivery is an approach in which the movement of software features and changes through the various stages of validation are automated to improve the overall performance of the business. It plays a major role in providing an enterprise with an edge over competitors in the market and moving ahead with an increased focus on their goals. DevOps encourage communication, collaboration, integration, and automation among software developers and IT operations to provide developers with more control of the production environment and a better understanding of the infrastructure. This will help improve the quality of delivering software, increase stability, security, delivery predictability, and maintainability. The following are the goals of DevOps.
  • Improve the deployment frequency to get more work done.
  • Achieve goals faster to release software faster into the market.
  • Reduce the failure rates of new releases by testing the code prior to production.
  • Shorten the lead time between fixes.
  • Reduce business initiative delays.
  • Establish reliable and secure test automation.
  • Integrate deployment automation across all environments.
  • Design the deployment pipeline and release process for faster and effective deployment.
  • Train the employees with the necessary knowledge.
DevOps maturity has several phases out of which the following are the key phrases.

Continuous Integration

  • The practice of integrating newly developed code with the existing code that needs to be released is known as continuous integration.
  • This process saves a lot of time as the system automatically checks the code, compiles it, and runs it for the basic testing.
  • CI is originally a part of agile engineering practice and has been adopted by DevOps maturity to successfully execute the code.

Continuous Delivery

  • An extension of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery has the code base continuously in a ready to deploy state.
  • When executing Continuous Delivery, the additional automation and testing are added so that the newly developed code is not just merged with the main code frequently, but also to ensure that the code is always ready to deploy without any human intervention.
  • This greatly reduces the risk of human error and simplifies the process to a great extent.

Continuous Deployment

  • Continuous Deployment is different from Continuous Delivery. It is the most advanced evolution of Continuous Delivery and follows the practice of deploying the entire process right into the production stage without any human involvement.
DevOps requires some important tools to successfully implement the process and get the desired results.

Code Repository

  • This is a storage place where developers check and change the code. The repository manages various versions of the code so that developers can keep track of the changes easily.

Build Server

  • This is an automation tool that compiles the code in the repo into an executable code base.

Virtual Infrastructure

  • Azure is the best example of virtual infrastructure. These have APIs to allow the teams to create new machines. When combined with the automated tools, the new code can be tested by sending it to the cloud infrastructure and running it in the test environment.

Test Automation

  • This focuses on automated testing within the build pipeline. It is done to ensure that by the time the teams have a deployable build, the code will be ready to be deployed.
The companies use proven DevOps implementation processes so that the automation is completed successfully in weeks and not months. They help in eliminating the defects and reducing failures.