Insights

Toppling the wall of confusion: The case for DevOps automation and CI/CD

Author: Jose Gonzalez

It’s a common scenario.

The development team is working hard to code new products, features, and updates. They’re incentivized to get code out the door as quickly as possible. They’re coding and testing on their individual machines, which could have any number of unique configurations.

Meanwhile, the operations team is working hard to keep the production environment stable. They’re incentivized to keep systems online and running smoothly so there are no customer impacts. Which means they often block things (like code) from going into production and causing instability.

Enter the Wall of Confusion.

Having thoroughly tested code on their machines, the development team throws their code over the Wall of Confusion to the production team. The production team tests the code, which does not operate as expected in the production environment. The production team throws the code back over the Wall of Confusion to the development team.

The development team gets frustrated because the product worked fine in their environment—so why can’t the operations team get it to work? The operations team is frustrated that the development team can’t build code that runs as it should in production.

This back and forth may happen several times before the code gets deployed into production, wasting time and money while escalating tension between the two teams—both of whom are doing the best they can

So how do you break down silos and topple the Wall of Confusion? Below, I’ll outline how DevOps practices can help by creating a consistent platform along with automated practices that accelerate continuous integration, continuous improvement, and continuous delivery while saving time and money.

CI/CD enables DevOps

First, let’s dispel the myth that you can deliver quickly OR maintain stability. DevOps provides the principles for building a highly available, cloud-based platform with automation tools for deployment into every environment. A CI/CD pipeline injects automated quality gates to give you confidence in the reliability and security of the code you’re deploying.

Embracing DevOps also means breaking down monolithic apps into microservices that can be updated and released into production without impacting any other teams. These smaller services enable developers to deploy with greater agility. So rather than waiting to release a massive update every three to six months (or longer), teams can deploy smaller updates multiple times a week (or even multiple times a day).

Finally, by establishing a stable DevOps platform, all developers work on a standard platform that provision production-like environments on demand. The platform offers a standard set of tools that are reliable and resilient, self-healing, and always available for app teams to leverage when building their CI/CD processes.

Beyondsoft helps leading automotive manufacturing company to modernize through DevOps automation

This use case is a classic example of how a scalable, enterprise DevOps solution can accelerate and automate continuous deployment, integration, and improvement.

The automotive leader wanted to break down silos and make innovation more accessible. But their system and processes created long development cycles and yielded increasing amounts of technical debt. Their teams couldn’t modernize in a standard way and projects languished in limbo for extended periods of time. To solve for this, Beyondsoft worked with the company to create a standardized set of automation tools by provisioning an enterprise-scalable DevOps platform, allowing their application teams to easily create continuous delivery pipelines. We helped them unify their development teams onto the highly available, cloud-configured DevOps platform and ensured they were enterprise scale ready. We then onboarded more than 120 different apps.

Features of the DevOps solutions include:

• Automation in the cloud: Even if an availability zone goes down, their platform doesn’t. The solution is highly resilient and highly available. Thanks in part to the cloud, there is no single point of failure. Everything from infrastructure provisioning to app configuration is automated. If the company decides to make a change to the tools or infrastructure, they just update the code. Plus, as they expand, the platform scales with them.
• Container-first strategy: The DevOps solution embraces containerization to further increase availability and resilience. If one containerized tool has an issue, the platform is self-healing and will automatically replace it with no impact to the application teams.
• Seamless ecosystem integration: The DevOps solution seamlessly integrates with their system as well as on-premise systems.
• Application language agnostic: No matter which coding language a developer uses, the DevOps platform can handle it with standardized pipeline patterns.  

  Everything from code builds to code scans to code deployment can be done securely from the DevOps platform. Artifactory provides a universal, binary repository management system that enables developers to deploy into any environment without code changes. 

  Today, this automotive company is enjoying all the benefits a scalable DevOps platform has to offer:
  • Shorter, faster release cycles
  • Better quality code and smoother deployments
  • Minimal downtime for the developers and their customers
  • Fail-fast environment
  • Amplified feedback loops via CI/CD pipelines and visibility into technical debt
  • Task automation
  • Increased efficiency and productivity
  • And no more silos!
• To learn more about how Beyondsoft can help you create an enterprise scalable DevOps/DevOps platform to accelerate innovation, give us a shout.