Image by ar130405 from Pixabay
For many, DevOps can be neatly defined as cooperation between development and operations teams. However, this teamwork is not all that DevOps incorporates. It also requires careful implementation of DevOps automation and Agile development practices. In this article, you will learn about the main principles of DevOps, and how to take your DevOps pipeline to the next level.
DevOps Principles Overview
DevOps implementations require a combination of technologies and practices that enable teams to develop, test, and deploy products quickly and consistently. Below are the four main aspects required for a successful DevOps deployment.
1. Agile planning
DevOps teams leverage Agile planning methods to ensure that projects are iterative and efficient. In planning, high-level objectives are defined and broken down into self-contained steps. These steps are completed in iterations that each end with a functional product with added value or features.
2. Agile infrastructure
A large part of what makes DevOps teams so efficient is the infrastructure technologies that are used to support Agile practices. These technologies include:
- Microservices—enables teams to separate applications and tools into modular services that can be scaled and combined as needed. This enables faster update, easier maintenance, and can increase availability.
- Containerization—microservices and applications are containerized. This enables services to be easily transferred between environments and eliminates issues caused by incompatible devices or operating systems.
- Cloud resources—public and private cloud services are used to enable scalability, availability, and distributed access to resources and assets. These resources enable teams to optimize costs, performance, and to ease collaboration. Today cloud vendors offer a wide range of services to improve pipelines, whether it’s infrastructure automation or solutions for file storage.
3. Infrastructure as code (IaC)
IaC is a practice that enables teams to manage their infrastructure and resources in the same way they manage code bases. It is based on reusable templates that define configurations and can serve a dual purpose of documentation. These templates ease modification of infrastructure and enable teams to leverage automation in the deployment of resources.
4. Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery is a practice that ensures that a functional product is always available for deployment. It incorporates continuously integrated code after that code passes testing and involves packaging code to make it ready for deployment. To accomplish continuous delivery, DevOps teams use continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
Components of a CI/CD Pipeline
CI/CD pipelines are chains of tools and processes that are used to automate the integration, building, testing, delivery, and deployment of code. These pipelines enable teams to standardize processes throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Pipelines also facilitate collaboration and provide visibility into processes, ensuring maximum productivity and minimum error.
Each pipeline is built to address four basic stages:
- Commit—once developers finish creating new code, they request for it to be merged with the codebase. This request starts the processes performed by the pipeline.
- Build—the new code is built into an artifact for testing.
- Test—the build is run through automated testing suites, including unit, integration, and functional tests. This stage may also include manual processes, such as acceptance testing.
- Delivery/deployment—once builds pass all tests, the code is merged with the codebase and the build is promoted for delivery. This involved deploying the new master build to a staging or production area for deployment and release.
How to Take Your DevOps Pipeline to The Next Level
When building your pipeline, there are a few practices you can incorporate to ensure that your team is working as efficiently and effectively as possible. Below are a few practices to start with.
Prioritize team management
Pipelines are meant to be toolchains that support and enhance team practices and workflows. When designing pipelines you need to keep in mind what tools your various team members need, what their roles and responsibilities are, and how processes need to overlap.
When implemented correctly, pipelines should help teams increase visibility and communication. Pipelines should also support self-service for team members as much as possible. For example, by allowing developers to automatically create development environments for new features based on templates created by operations.
Address issues immediately
One of the biggest benefits of CI/CD pipelines is the visibility that is created into processes and workflows. To gain this benefit, you need to leverage visibility to identify issues early on and fix those issues immediately. If you don’t, the automation that comes with pipelines can cause issues to quickly spiral out of control.
Maintain standardization
Pipelines should be designed to standardize workflows. This includes the deployment of resources, the creation and configuration of environments, and the building and testing of code. You should limit any processes performed outside of your pipelines to ensure that this standardization is maintained.
For environments, make sure that you are provisioning clean, isolated environments from a template for every test process. For builds, make sure that you are using the same build throughout testing. By maintaining the integrity of these assets you ensure that testing and integration are reliable and consistent.
Pause between deployments and releases
You may want to consider pausing automation between deployment and release. Doing so enables you to build-in manual checks such as user acceptance testing. You can also more methodically release products.
For example, with a pause between deployment and release, you can more easily incorporate A/B testing or blue-green rollouts. These practices can help you get more valuable feedback from customers and reduce the impact of updates on your users.
Secure your pipeline and CI/CD environment
A well-deployed pipeline requires proper security. Your pipeline includes some of your most valuable assets and provides direct access to both your systems and your users. Without proper security measures, attackers can abuse your resources, steal valuable code, or inject malicious code into your codebase.
Additionally, you need security measures that can ensure that your pipelines remain available. DevOps pipelines are typically mission-critical and loss of access to these toolchains can result in significant revenue and productivity losses. To ensure proper security, pipelines should be built using network segmentation and strict role-based access controls should be applied.
Conclusion
DevOps pipelines are built with agile planning and infrastructure principles in mind. This often means leveraging IaC for automated continuous delivery. While any DevOps pipeline needs processes for committing, building, testing and deploying code, there is room for customizing the processes to fit your project.
Part of this customization work involves implementing best practices that prioritize team management. Remember that while your pipeline leverages a great deal of tooling, all of these technologies are implemented in the use of team members. This means creating processes, standards, and workflows that suit not only your tech, but also your team.
Author Bio
Gilad David Maayan is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Imperva, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership.