You may have heard Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, and DevOps used interchangeably, or you may have needed clarification on one for the other.
These distinct yet interconnected notions interact in pursuit of a similar objective. If you want a simple equation to illustrate this relationship, here it is:
Continuous delivery of high-quality software > Continuous deployment of incremental versions > DevOps recommended practices
Let’s illustrate this with an example.
Imagine you go to a high-end restaurant and request the most costly and delicious well-done meal. As soon as your food appears at the table, you focus solely on eating it.
Let’s determine your objective: A well-prepared lunch with prompt service.
So, are you concerned about the credentials and skill sets of the kitchen’s chefs?
No!
Are you curious as to whether or not the cooks get along and operate as a team?
Nope!
Are you attentive to the components used to cook your food?
Maybe, but probably not!
Important to you is receiving a meal that delivers both satisfaction and value for your money.
Ingredients of excellent quality, high-end chefs working as a team, according to the best culinary procedures, etc., are vital, but your subconscious assumes they will all be there. These conditions must be met for a restaurant to acquire a positive reputation over time.
As a consumer, you aim to receive high-quality food swiftly. Therefore, you leave the cooking and other minutiae to the chefs. You provide feedback by patronizing the eatery and recommending it to others. If your ultimate aim, i.e., the food and service, are met, you will become a devoted client; otherwise, you will patronize the restaurant two blocks away.
So, what conclusion can we make from this?
DevOps best practices are the essential components of a successful software development recipe. However, customers are only interested in the food or the two ultimate goals:
- More robust software
- Rapid and consistent delivery of software
Therefore, it is irrelevant to your client if you implement DevOps best practices. The client is more concerned with the speed of your release cycles and the structure of your delivery pipeline.
The DevOps experience: From specifications to deployment
DevOps is a journey, and as a company traverses this journey, numerous outcomes result from their adoption of DevOps. Let’s discuss these results to comprehend better what the DevOps journey entails:
Better requirements and Agile
In the Waterfall process, the route from requirements to a single produced feature might take more than two months before testing. However, the Agile technique reduces development time to two weeks. In Agile, we strive to offer tiny, incremental, and controllable changes, which enables us to remain flexible while meeting business needs.
This makes Agile the superior technique of requirement management, replacing outmoded waterfall methods.
Evaluations and pull requests
Reviews and pull requests are interconnected results. Each pull request concludes with a mandatory review to ensure the quality of the final software product.
Continuous incorporation
An automatic build is initiated every time code is committed following a pull request. The code is subjected to many static code and security scans to ensure that static code and security concerns are identified during compilation. During the development journey, these gates help avoid erroneous coding techniques and eventual security issues. Automation and tooling integration help in accomplishing continuous integration.
Integration tests assess the system as a whole and ensure that a single application module does not negatively affect other modules.
Regression, QA, and continuous testing
The following setting is quality assurance. Regression tests are conducted to ensure that any modifications made to the product do not damage the previously operating functionality.
Continuous testing is also a component of the DevOps journey, as we automate the tests and have the pipeline trigger all of these automated tests. After establishing fundamental functioning, we conduct regression, security, performance, and load tests.
Production and Set Design
Here, the code configuration is confirmed, finally allowing the code to be deployed in production. This transfer of binaries from one environment to another and how they activate various tests to safeguard the code from errors is a significant portion of the DevOps journey.
Continuous delivery and implementation
Continuous deployment and delivery are related ideas, with delivery coming first. Before every release, manual approvals are required for delivery, although deployments are automated.
Continuous deployment occurs when the code checked in and validated by the developer is automatically pushed to production if all automated release criteria are met. A degree of post-deployment validation is conducted, and if the validation fails, an automatic rollback is performed to prevent a production outage. 7. Continuous monitoring and improvement
Each environment is monitored via continuous monitoring. Continuous monitoring is essential for the development of self-healing settings. For instance, when you use the cloud, your CPU automatically scales up, and additional servers are introduced, so your capacity rises and decreases based on your demand.
How do significant enterprises utilize continuous deployment?
Google, Amazon, and Netflix are all involved in continuous deployment. This is because their production environment undergoes hundreds of deployments daily. And they can do it without disrupting the production processes due to the automation they’ve implemented. In other words, they may fail quickly and automatically when problems arise.
To further comprehend, let’s return to the restaurant scenario. The meal delivered to you is the delivery, but your enjoyment and satisfaction with it is the deployment. DevOps is the supply chain, ingredients, kitchen, chefs, waiters, customer feedback, and interactions between them. DevOps is, therefore, very necessary to facilitate continuous delivery.
Thus, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous deployment are all friends of the exact cause. Each endeavor to reach the same result: quicker delivery with higher quality and more consistency.
Continuous business assurance results from DevOps-enabled continuous delivery. And that it is an objective worth pursuing.
Summing things up
When working with DevOps-using teams to help them adopt continuous delivery, our advice is consistent: evaluate how long it takes to move from concept to useable software in your users’ hands. To minimize the identified cycle time, utilize a more scientifically reasonable approach to decision making.
Continuous business assurance results from DevOps-enabled continuous delivery. And that it is an objective worth pursuing. 10Pearls is providing you DevOps as a Service so if you are looking for Cloud DevOps Services then we are here to provide you with customized solutions for all your business needs.
