devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: App deployment

  • Low-Code Meets DevOps: A Smart Way to Manage Modern App Delivery Demands

    Low-Code Meets DevOps: A Smart Way to Manage Modern App Delivery Demands

    In a fast-moving and often fiercely competitive marketplace, companies need to embrace technology to stay relevant and drive growth. To this end, the business community is increasingly placing a high priority on digital transformation. In fact, more than 80% of organizations believe that digital transformation is crucial to business success.

    Digitally driven processes can power increased business speed and agility, as well as enhance competitive differentiation. Many organizations are now focusing on tools and methodologies that allow them to optimize more processes through accelerated internal application development efforts. Their goal is to be able to create, test and deploy the volume (and variety) of applications required to elevate performance and unlock more opportunities.

    In response to these growing needs for rapid app delivery, DevOps practices are evolving and becoming more critical to the success and agility of a business. According to a study conducted by Verified Market Research, the global DevOps market was valued at $3.62 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 20.01 billion by 2026. Today, many businesses are combining DevOps approaches with low-code or no-code app development platforms, because these solutions provide them with the tools to build applications faster and more efficiently. This strategy helps to alleviate the immense pressures placed on developers today, by streamlining their workloads and responsibilities, while simultaneously enabling them to reduce their development cycle times.

    The Business Benefits of Fast, Agile Application Development

    Due to combining the roles, practices and culture of software developers and ITOps teams, DevOps allows a business to deploy apps more rapidly and with a higher degree of consistency. This is essential in organizations where there’s more pressure than ever before to deliver applications at the speed of internal and external demand.

    Often, the goal of adopting DevOps within a company is to reduce the tedious manual tasks that monopolize developers’ time and lead to app delivery backlogs. Solutions that help lighten and streamline the workload of DevOps–through automation and low-code development environments–are becoming more critical as a growing number of demands are being put on this still somewhat evolving, yet increasingly prioritized, team role and culture.

    Outlined below are a few examples of how low-code app development platforms can enhance the growing role of DevOps and improve the bottom line. This approach helps to:

    • Broaden the app development space to non-technical professionals: As mentioned before, low-code platforms enable a wider pool of less-technical users to work on and improve the speed at which applications can be built. Instead of the traditional app development team being solely responsible for a growing number of application requests, business users are now able to support digital transformation efforts by building and modifying their own processes, without writing complex lines of code.

    This approach makes the process of development more accessible to non-technical professionals. As a result, businesses can liberate their developers from routine coding work and redeploy these highly skilled individuals to more strategic projects that are critical to core business processes.

    • Facilitate faster application building: In addition to making application builds more accessible and less complex, the low-code environment also speeds up the entire development and deployment process. With this approach, companies can reduce development timelines from weeks or months to hours or days. Accelerating this cycle is crucial in any business that aims to outpace competitors.
    • Streamline consistent application deployment: Low-code platforms can integrate into toolchains (or a set of programming tools) that can automate the deployment of applications across various business environments. This ensures that apps created by non-developers can be deployed in the same manner as traditional, developer-based applications. This consistency provides a lower cost of ownership because it allows a low-code platform to more easily integrate into the business processes and workflows the organization already has in place. This minimizes the risk of disruption and irregularities.

    As businesses embrace innovation and elevate performance across the enterprise through agile, accelerated app delivery, the role and function of DevOps will continue to grow in influence and priority. Businesses that strategically leverage low-code solutions in combination with modern DevOps practices are likely to position themselves for growth, competitive differentiation and sustainable business success.

    — Holly Anderson

  • Speed Rules in Chef’s DevOps Survey

    Speed Rules in Chef’s DevOps Survey

    DevOps is all about streamlining and accelerating. Organizations that embrace DevOps are driven by a focus on maximizing the combination of efficiency and effectiveness—which explains why speed is the central theme of Chef’s “The State of Enterprise Applications” survey.

    Chef surveyed nearly 350 application and operations professionals in an effort to understand trends in DevOps, identify how the industry is shifting and get an idea of what the future of DevOps looks like. What it found is that speed is one of the primary driving factors for organizations that function at the cutting edge of technology. Chef also found that organizations are eager to adopt new platforms that promise to help them move faster.

    The Need for Speed

    There are a variety of ways to measure success for application development and deployment. You can look at the features and capabilities of the app and whether it delivers the expected functionality, or you can determine success based on user feedback and how satisfied users are with the app experience. According to the Chef survey, 72 percent of organizations are focused on speed as the primary measure of a successful app deployment.

    That said, it generally takes weeks—or even months—to get an app developed and deployed. More than 60 percent of survey respondents shared that it takes days or more to complete an application build, and 55 percent indicated that it takes four or more builds before an app is ready to be deployed. Almost 60 percent said it takes days or more to actually deploy the app once the final build is approved.

    Platforms and Tools to Accelerate App Deployment

    In the quest for speed, organizations are moving to platforms and tools that can help accelerate development and decrease the time it takes to make an app available. According to data from “The State of Enterprise Applications” survey:

    • Only 9 percent of organizations are using public cloud for more than 50 percent of app deployments today, but that is expected to increase to 32 percent by 2020.
    • There is a 144 percent increase expected in the next two years in the number of organizations using container technology for more than 50 percent of app deployments—to 22 percent from 9 percent today.
    • The number of organizations using microservices for more than 50 percent of app deployments is expected to double—to 24 percent from 12 percent—in the next two years.
    • More than 80 percent of survey respondents are adopting a multi-cloud strategy.

    Putting App Deployment in High Gear

    Chef is in the business of automating and streamlining app development and deployment, so it should come as no surprise that the survey included questions related to that as well. The report states, “The most successful software-centric organizations use one consistent way of building, deploying, and managing applications.”

    More than 9 out of 10 (93 percent) of survey participants agreed that an application packaging solution that allows deployment to any environment would be valuable. This is especially true when developers have to deal with hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

    If speed is your primary measure of success for app deployment, you need to make sure you have the tools and processes necessary to develop and deploy applications as quickly as possible. Chef’s report shows organizations are well on their way.

    — Tony Bradley

  • Think of the Future When Building Delivery

    Think of the Future When Building Delivery

    We’re in a strange state of the pendulum swing right now, where speed of delivery is king and all else seems to take a back seat. Many orgs even place quality behind speed in the claim that “we’ll get it right later,” but I’m talking about the more universal rush to deploy and the infrastructures we’re building to do it.

    In short, look around your organization. Do you have apps more than 10 years old? Are you working on the same type of app? Then spin your mind ahead and consider what it will be like for someone in that time.

    Future-Proofing Delivery

    You cannot stop the advance of technology, but you can make the environment adaptable. There are some easy tricks to provide for the future when it comes to your DevOps toolset.

    COBOL Still Needed. Source: Hackerrank.com

    Virtually Perfect

    First, build your continuous integration/continuous deployment/application release automation (CI/CD/ARA) architecture on virtual machines (VMs) or cloud instances. If your standard is containers, then use them—but on top of a VM. The reason is simple: Given the vagaries of business environment and IT priorities, a fully installed VM gives you a buffer—you have everything needed to run the environment in a contained package. Containers alone won’t be good enough, as the underlying OS impacts container operations. As an extreme example, the switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.0 was massive and broke things. A DevOps environment based solely on containers would break with it, while a VM running RHEL  5 or 6X would keep clipping along, as long as your virtualization environment ran.

    Get Versions In-House

    While the executables for any CI/CD/ARA toolset and development languages will be in-house, there is far more to a modern development environment than just those parts. The libraries/modules your code relies on must be available. Increasingly, we pull them on build, but that becomes a problem when suddenly they are significantly changed or downright missing. There is a market of hosted, verified module vendors out there these days that guarantee availability of a given version of each module they support, and that is an option; however, a better one is to pull them once and put them into your own enterprise repository. Is it another thing to maintain? Yes. But it might save your project from having to emergency patch—and frankly, that kind of insurance is worth it.

    Choose Wisely

    Like any relatively new market, there are a lot of CI/CD/ARA toolsets out there. Do evaluations; don’t just grab the one that a team member likes or is familiar with. Look at the longevity and stability of the project/vendor as much as the tool, because we’re talking about hedging for the future. In the early days (and even occasionally today), open source aficionados would say “We have the source, we’ll do fine,” which is technically true, but most organizations aren’t in the business of maintaining their dev/deploy tools and don’t want to be, so a little research goes a long way.

    Plan as Though You Chose Poorly

    Know what you’ll do if, in spite of evaluations, the project/product you chose goes away. While it’s not CI/CD, I was on a team that selected Mambo right before the big team split that created Joomla and doomed Mambo. Our choice was intelligently made based upon available information, but things still came around to burn us. And it could happen to your choice, too, whether you choose open source or commercial. So have an idea of what you would do in that scenario and document it. If we adopt enough IT tools, it’s guaranteed that some of them will fail over time, so this is not a totally wasted exercise. And should you ever need it, knowing what the plan is before things are falling apart helps keep level heads.

    Quality Over Speed

    Remember that time to delivery is super hugely important, and for decades was not given the credence it deserves. But as I mentioned above, recognize that right now the pendulum has swung so far the other way that many shops have a “just get it out, we’ll make it better later” mentality. Don’t join in where your DevOps environment is concerned. The architecture you are constructing should be for the long run—unless you enjoy rebuilding it regularly and the delays to production code such rebuilding threatens, then ignore this point.

    Security, Security, Security

    DevOps and security has had a rough relationship, but let’s talk about your DevOps environment instead of security’s impact on rapid delivery. Once you’ve thrown all of your build into one easy-to-use tool, the risk from a successful outsider or a risky insider is commensurately larger. Use tools that support role-based access control (RBAC) and make sure application programming interfaces (APIs) are properly locked down. Give security the time it needs to build a list of recommendations for DevOps toolsets that will protect them in almost any eventuality. Because the combined ability to mess with the build process and the deployment process through one automated toolset is powerful and dangerous, make sure you’re monitoring and it’s secure.

    Consider a Modicum of Standardization

    In my entire career, “We are an X shop” has never seemed to work. I’ve been at places that tried to use a single database vendor or a single development language, and inevitably, other forces override these directives. But there is a benefit to keeping the number of languages or database variants down, and that benefit is most felt in the CI/CD space. Keeping track of which DB goes with this project, or keeping that DB up to date—or determining the new release will introduce incompatibilities—all falls on the DevOps environments. Keeping the amount of accumulated future change down is in the organization’s best interests.

    Make Cool Stuff

    Every time I think I’ve maxed out on awe, something new comes along. We are on the cusp of fully automated build/test/deploy with ARA tools calling both CI/CD tools and application provisioning tools. Keep pushing the edge, give vendors your feedback or projects your mods, and making it better. Because there’s a fundamental change here that we want to see through to the end. And I love playing with the toys.

    — Don Macvittie