DevOps: The Catalyst for Accelerated Software Delivery

devops-the-catalyst-for-accelerated-software-delivery

Introduction

The DevOps paradigm is a software development process and organizational culture shift that accelerates the delivery of higher-quality software by automating and combining the efforts of development and IT operations teams.
The goal of DevOps is to satisfy the ever-growing demands of software users for frequent, cutting-edge feature updates, uninterrupted performance, and reliability. DevOps-adopting teams grow into high-performing enterprises that generate the best products faster for happier consumers.
Best DevOps processes go beyond development and operations to incorporate inputs from all application stakeholders into the software development lifecycle, including platform and infrastructure engineering, security, compliance, governance, risk management, line-of-business, end-users, and customers.

The DevOps lifecycle

  1. Planning:
    Using case studies, prioritized end-user feedback, and input from all internal stakeholders, teams in this workflow plan new features and functionality for the upcoming release.
  2. Development:
    In this stage of DevOps, developers test, code, and create new and improved features based on user requirements and backlog items.
  3. Integration(Continuous integration/delivery “CI/CD”):
    Checking out the code from a source code repository, merging code changes into a “master” copy, and automating the compilation, unit testing, and executable packaging are all examples of common automation tasks done in this phase.
  4. Deployment:
    This stage involves the deployment of runtime build output (from integration) to a runtime environment, often a development environment, where runtime tests are carried out for security, compliance, and quality.
  5. Operations:
    By being confident about the network, storage, platform, and security posture, operations ensure that features are functioning properly and there are no service outages.
  6. Learning( feedback):
    To plan for improvements and changes in the upcoming version, end users and customers are being polled about features, functionality, performance, and business value.

These procedures are followed by the following three crucial continuous workflows:

  1. Continuous testing:
    DevOps permits testing at every stage of the life cycle, including planning (behavior-driven development), development (unit-contract testing), integration (static code scans, linting), deployment (penetration testing, configuration testing), operations (chaos testing, compliance testing), and learning (A/B testing).
  2. Security:
    DevOps aims to integrate security consistently throughout the remainder of the development cycle, starting with planning when security issues are the easiest and least expensive to fix.
  3. Compliance:
    The best way to deal with regulatory compliance (risk and governance) is to do it early in the development lifecycle.

DevOps tools

The high standards of the DevOps culture impose a premium on tooling that facilitates reactive collaboration smoothly integrates workflows and optimizes the overall DevOps lifecycle as substantially as feasible.
DevOps project management tools include GitHub Issues and Jira. Tools used for integration (CI/CD) pipelines are Jenkins, CircleCI, Spinnaker, and ArgoCD (for Kubernetes native CI/CD ). Git and GitHub are two open-source code repositories for the collaboration of multiple developers on vision-controlled code. For test automation, famous automation frameworks used in DeOps include Katalon, Serenity, Selenium, and Appium. Open-source monitoring tools include Nagios, Prometheus, and Splunk. For customer feedback surveys, self-service ticketing, and heat mapping are in practice.

Jenkins

Arcana uses Jenkins for the C-/CD automation. Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration/delivery and deployment (CI/CD) automation software tool. Jenkins uses plug-ins to accomplish continuous integration and is written in Java. By establishing a master-worker cluster, Jenkins can also be configured to conduct distributed builds over a fleet of workstations or nodes. Jenkins manages distributed builds using a master-worker architecture. Each element plays a particular part:

Jenkins Master handles the scheduling of the build job and distributes the build to the worker nodes for executions. It is also responsible for monitoring the worker node’s states while collecting and aggregating build results in web dashboards.

Jenkins Workers or build agents, run on a remote machine, receive requests from Jenkins Master and execute build jobs, it is a Java executable. Workers’ nodes are added and removed subsequently and automatically workload is distributed to them to take the load off the master Jenkins server.

Components of Jenkin Masters

Jenkins Jobs is the Jenkins pipeline used to build code, test code, run a shell script, and many other tasks.

Plugins

For continuous integration community- developed modules called Plugins are used by Jenkins servers, which also help in error control and smooth exception handling.

Jenkins Credentials

Jenkins Credentials are used to connect the Jenkins pipeline to the cloud, server, database, or API. these credentials are encrypted by Jenkins.
Three secrets as credentials used in Jenkins are;

  • Secret text
  • Password and username
  • SSH keys

Jenkins Nodes/Clouds

Jenkins jobs can be configured to run on several agent nodes (Linux/Windows) or clouds (Docker, Kubernetes).

Global Configuration

Native Jenkins global configurations and configurations for installed plugins are under Jenkins global configuration.

How Organizations adopt DevOps

Development, operations, and testing have always been compartmentalized activities. To enhance and shorten the time needed to respond to consumer input, DevOps brings them together. Organizations adopt DevOps which enables them to;

  • Scale DevOps successfully without interfering with business.
  • Incessantly deploy software into development, test, and production environments.
  • Improve application stability, reliability, security, and quality by releasing updates frequently.
  • Support rapid market response and creation of captivating user experiences.
  • Contribute to cost savings by increasing effectiveness and decreasing outages.
  • Model a startup culture that brings business, development, and operations together.

    Arcana has a team of fully certified professionals with experience of 2.5 years in the DevOps domain working to achieve the goal to satisfy the ever-growing demands of software users for frequent, cutting-edge feature updates, uninterrupted performance, and reliability.
    By adopting DevOps, Arcana promises to accelerate software deployment and produce outcomes of higher quality. Arcana is working in collaboration with Pakistan’s leading and most trusted telecom service provider company Jazz in two promoting domains telecommunications and FinTech. Our client (Jazz) wants constant availability of its services, predictability of results, and stability of operations. Arcana professionals utilize Jenkins DevOps technologies to build pipelines that automate every process, including developing, setting up test environments, testing code, packaging it for deployment, and rolling updates that allow production servers to be updated without impacting hence improving security, constant server availability, and quicker upgrades. In this FinTech project collaboration, we offer our client routine operation automation, better transparency, and forecasting, security and compliance, and facilitate the audit.
    In telecom project collaboration our professionals offer;

  • Transparent, and efficient control over the network.

  • The orchestration of network resources in real-time.

  • High availability, scalability, and resilience.

  • Accelerated time-to-market for new applications, features, and products.

Arcana services

Apps and microservices Development

  • Develop cloud applications following DevOps development methods and strategies to ensure the use of microservices and advanced APIs

Application Modernization

  • identifying the best strategy for application modernization to achieve goals like optimization, security, and scalability.

Container Adoption

  • Containerized solutions for the deployment of modern and advanced distributed applications.

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