DevOps

When starting with DevOps it can seem like a daunting journey. Bootstrapping is easier when engaging with a team that has the skills and expertise. We are more than happy to help you on the DevOps journey.

Agile practices alone do not cater for the full software development lifecycle from inception through to live plus ongoing change and maintenance. There are ongoing operational & administrative aspects to deploying and maintaining software and underlying systems and hardware across the various stages on the route from development to live.

The DevOps culture and practices offer to fill the gap between development and operations with workflow automation. DevOps promises extremely fast change release cycles. It is not for organisations to be able to rollout changes through all of the route-to-live stages from development to production within 2 hours or less depending on the achieved level of release & test automation.

It is possible - and in many cases indeed desirable - to fully automate the release & feedback process. This makes businesses that adopt DevOps extremely Agile and the organisation can experiment frequently to determine the best path to solve a challenge in hours from fast feedback.

DevOps offers the following tools:

  1. Common source code management and version control practices; e.g. Git(Hub) and feature/master branching
  2. Build automation; compilation of code and generation of artifacts
  3. Test automation; unit, integration and functional testing
  4. Build Artifact staging in a repository
  5. Release management - release approval and deployment automation
  6. Configuration management - infrastructure configuration, infrastructure as code & parameterisation
  7. Monitoring - performance, issue monitoring and alerting

Combined with Cloud, DevOps really comes to the fore because AWS, other Cloud providers and 3rd parties offer very compelling tools to accommodate all of the abovementioned points. Some of the most important DevOps enablers are pipelines and infrastructure as code.