Automating your software pipeline with continuous delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is the process of continually delivering software and updates to production in smaller increments, ensuring that the software can be released at any time. With this approach, development teams are always prepared to deliver at any time to production.
Continuous delivery is a pipeline or a life cycle of a code. The main focus and objective of CD is to build, test, and release product to the customer faster and more frequently, in short cycles.
Using the CD model, newly developed or updated code from the software team gets tested at different stages both through manual and automated tests, passes both the manual and automated stage gates, and moves into production. The benefits of utilizing CD for software development include:
Modernizing with CD
The process of modernizing applications is made up of three components: Cloud-native architecture, continuous delivery, and infrastructure automation. These typically work concurrently but do have distinct characteristics.
- Cloud-native architecture transforms organizations from monolithic applications to containerized microservices applications in which lightweight data collectors help enable success
- Continuous delivery
- Infrastructure automation
Continuous delivery is critical to business transformation success. Because there may be industry pressure to keep up with competitors (often cloud-native companies) who are pushing updates out faster. The bar is set increasingly higher as users become accustomed to applications that are exceptionally reliable and frequently updated and improved.
In addition to CD, there are two additional levels of transformation that teams must implement in order to reach the goal of continuous delivery. Companies must also adopt agile development, an incremental approach to project management and software development, and a DevOps approach, which supports high-velocity delivery. These two methods are most effective working in lock-step, when they’re practiced over time to refine processes and uncover what works best for the team.
Incorporating CD with DevOps
The best way to begin on the journey to CD is to start adopting an agile approach to development. However, agile by itself is not sufficient. Incorporating a DevOps approach adds an important component to this journey.
DevOps involves increasing collaboration and implementing a tighter feedback loop between the development and operations teams. This enhanced connectivity between the teams translates to increased speed of delivery, along with increased reliability, and stability in production.
Another part of DevOps is the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach. A SRE approach involves automating as many repetitive tasks as possible and spending at least 50 percent of the team’s time focusing on improving application reliability, instead of simply maintaining it.
Once a team has organized around DevOps and SRE principles, they can continue refining their process and work culture to increase the frequency and reliability of updates.
Overcoming the challenges of CD
Of course, the CD approach is not without its issues. Checks and balances must be built into the processes in order to ensure a successful implementation.
- Ensure seamless communication between developers and operations teams. Development teams often instrument their own tools, such as lightweight and open source solutions, but these don’t necessarily translate into production environments. Particularly for CD, development teams must ensure their code is ready for production, and operations teams need to trust that this is the case.
If the two teams are using separate tools, visibility is limited, which can result in delays. Cloud app management solutions offer a solution by making it easy for developers to add lightweight data collectors to their code, which will also seamlessly work in the production environment. When a code change occurs, the production team can see it and developers can easily quickly grasp how their code is working in production. This feedback loop is critical to accelerating delivery.
- Identify code bugs early with lightweight data collectors. Another impediment to accelerating application delivery is that bugs are often not discovered during development. This can result in costly fixes once the code is deployed.
By incorporating lightweight data collectors early in the development process, the dev team can find and fix bugs before going into production. This is essential for a successful CD implementation.
- Automate application processes. Seeing how changes correlate to performance can be another challenge. Deployment tools can automate application deployment by promoting code through the pipeline, and it can also rollback or uninstall applications.
Automating these processes is a key component of CD. To make it even more valuable, companies can connect deployment tools and cloud management tools to measure how the deployment correlates with application performance.
- Support multiple development pipelines. To successfully implement CD, it’s important that enterprises support multiple development pipelines for dev, staging, test, and production. This enables work to continue in each pipeline without affecting the others.
With this agile approach, the same data collectors run in your services whether they are running in dev, staging, test, or production.
- Continuously monitor key metrics. If and when one does occur, it can be difficult to quickly find the root cause of a problem. This is due, in no small part, to the wide range of specialized technologies that make up the distributed network of microservices comprising an application.
There’s no time to have the experts in each technology look through their logs and determine if their service is causing the problem. Dashboard monitoring tools can help by looking for signals such as latency, errors, traffic, and saturation. Teams can immediately see these, and root causes can be quickly identified and fixed.
Need help automating your software delivery pipeline?
Talk to our experts to evaluate how our Managed Product Development Services can help you deliver product faster, more cost-effectively. Contact us today for a free, no obligation chat!
