Continuous Development, Testing, & Delivery with DevOps

Enterprise IT organizations continuously need to deploy new features onto their platform-as-a-service with no defects, minimum time and low cost. DevOps is an approach that helps in achieving speed and quality. DevOps approach uses an agile relationship between developments and IT operations. 

It enables the collaboration between business and all the phases of development cycle like development, testing and IT operations with all the tools being used by each function to ensure minimum time delivery and quality with no defects. DevOps Processes are established by leveraging the right stack of tools and technologies. Let us see how it can be integrated in to an organization.

Implementing DevOps

1. Building DevOps as a Culture

An organization can gain its fruits when DevOps is started being absorbed as an organization’s culture, to integrate. DevOps culture it needs good collaboration within the teams participating in development and operations. Similar to Agile, where requirements and solutions evolve through continuous collaboration, deployments, testing, monitoring and feedback from OPS team in the early stage of development and their active participation until the production releases.

1. Process Automation

The fundamental of DevOps is to implement automation right from the code verification to deployment passing through all delivery stages, which includes code integration, builds, testing, deploying, verifying the deployed builds, etc. This automation helps developers get on-time feedbacks that ultimately reduce its time to market. 

1. Continuous Code Integration:

Continuous Integration (CI) addresses the developer group in the DevOps lifecycle. Here, seamless error-free builds with best techniques & standards of version controls are adopted and then picked up for the deployment in the specified environments.  Selecting the right toolset as per the need is the biggest challenge. Hudson, Jenkins, Bamboo, are some of the tools used for continuous integration.

Code Integration Tools: Git, SVN, Hudson, Jenkins, Bamboo

1. Continuous Code Testing:

DevOps emphasis on types and phases of testing, as it is an integral part of the development cycle which showcases the product quality delivered to the end customers. The goal of continuous testing is to provide fast and continuous feedback about the business risks in the latest build which is used to determine if the software is ready to progress through the delivery pipeline at any given time. Tools like Maven, Selenium, Cucumber, and Robot Framework are widely used tools for testing.

Code Testing Tools: Python Framework, Selenium, Maven, Robot Framework

1. Continuous Orchestration:

Generally, applications are of multi-tier in their architecture, which describes that each application has dependencies that need to be managed. Consequently, containers are created for fast and reliable deployment of application components on any underlying infrastructure. Orchestration will look up for container creation in order of dependency and the necessary configuration needed for the communication and passing on the required runtime properties to one another.

Orchestration Tools: Docker, Kubernetes

1. Dynamic Configuration and Deployment:

The configuration management tool helps in keep consistent environments throughout the software development process across all the stages of the delivery pipeline. The commonly used tools are Chef, Ansible, Vagrant, Puppet.

Continuous deployment is the core of DevOps. It follows continuous delivery and automatically deploys all changes that pass the automated tests to production. Some of the popular tools for deployment are Capistrano, Electric Flow, Octopus Deploy, Continuum.

Dynamic Deployment Tools: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Vagrant

1. Continuous Monitoring:

Continuous monitoring of the entire DevOps lifecycle ensures development and operations teams collaboration for optimized user experience. Monitoring enables to collect and analyze data in testing environments. Tools like Librato, Nagios, Zabbix, Sensu, Logstash generate the data for the team showing whether the performance is improved or not helping to take corrective measures.

Monitoring Tools:  Nagios, Sensu, Icinga2, Librato

As we see from the above points, implementing DevOps in an organization helps reduce build, release and deployment time with improved quality.
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