Scaling and Balancing A Continuous Delivery Pipeline Through DevOps Training

Is your organization running and balancing a continuous delivery pipeline smoothly? The trend of Continuous Delivery is taking the software industry by storm. Most enterprises have to deal with thousands of business-critical software and applications. To deliver results, they are under constant pressure to provide faster and better software without compromising on the quality and without any delay.

In short, it is becoming impossible for enterprises to afford the lengthy, unpredictable, and inefficient processes, which also include various manual procedures that could delay the software release. Setting up independent pipelines makes it pretty impossible to scale up the processes, especially in a massive environment. An organization may require additional staff, tools, and even more scripting to keep up.

DevOps Training is a great solution for such enterprises to accelerate velocity at scale. Instead of working individually, the product teams work together to leverage a series of supported pipelines. A team provided with DevOps training course can bridge the gap between operations and development to deliver more value to the business and at a faster pace. The practices break down the traditional silos that affect the process flow and communication to establish a culture where major organization departments participate in sharing responsibility for operations and development.

Once the gap between development and operation departments is reduced, release trains initiate to operate as a Continuous Delivery pipeline to implement, define, and deliver innovation without compromising on the operations support, quality, and time.

Continuous Delivery (CD) and DevOps

To scale up the CD process, the teams must address constraints and inefficiencies that could be plaguing a business from within for years. They must also pay attention to the existing software practices to identify if there's any technical debt and implement methods that deliver results. Not all deployment pipelines are repeatable. In such a case, the DevOps training will help the team members to use the manual procedures to fix issues that restrict team velocity and drain resources.

For trained employees, it is easier to understand and coordinate these complex releases to implement Continuous Delivery for balancing and controlling the pace of change and need for application stability and health.

Best Practice for Continuous Delivery for Scaling and Balancing

The guidelines below highlights implementation of your Continuous Delivery system in-depth to help you prepare your DevOps team for success:

The Right Mindset

Continuous Delivery is not just a process. It is also a way of thinking. As far as a CD environment is concerned, the applications present here are always ready for deployment, which also means that the DevOps team should be on alert. They must:

• Prepare the automated tests for the application builds
• Utilize the same application build throughout the pipeline
• Identify and resolve problems present in the code, not in place
• Get rid of an application build that does not prove worthwhile and continuously creates problems

The DevOps team must keep a check on the code, allow the pipeline to work, and move the new application through the pipeline. The key is to create a common CD vision and move everything accordingly. Once you start with meaningful steps, you will be in the right directions for setting up an effective continuous delivery pipeline.

Continuous Integration

While it is possible to implement and refine continuous integration without the presence of CD, but it is possible to implement vice versa. Continuous Integration (CI) is a process where the software code is merged into an automated build process before putting it through automated tests. The codes are updated and added to the source code repository.

After adjusting the CI, CD helps with the process of integration before the final release. If your CD pipeline is running smooth, software products are free from development dependencies and timelines. In fact, they are ready to be released and are launched based on the market as well as consumer demand.

Development and Production

It is important for DevOps to reach to a comfortable point to keep the releases from becoming a boring routine. Of course, it is important to put a break between production and development. You must be able to operate in an environment where you can validate the released without any hands-on. The validation process includes mechanisms and scripts to deploy the application and build the environment according to the plan.

Some projects require multiple environments to stop for validation. These include:

• Staging
• Pre-production
• User Acceptance Testing
• System Testing

Regardless of the number of operating environments you have, keep in mind that DevOps makes the procedures easier.

Treat Environments Same

The first and most important concept related to CD is that the overall release package - from application builds to environment configuration - is smooth and ready for production. Instead of treating production in a completely different environment, use the same automation processes to keep the procedure simple. Treating environments differently is not important. The best way to utilize all the benefits is to use the same release mechanism. Not only it enables the system for automated troubleshooting but also leads to fewer issues with environment and deployment process.

Automate it All

It is important to mention the role of automation for scaling and balancing a CD pipeline. However, it is also important to note that not all steps will be automated. You will still have to maintain some manual processes before the deployment takes place. And these processes should be manual to help you identify if the end result is as per your expectations. To have a smooth and successful pipeline, keep a check on your end-to-end processes and identify the manual processes that need to be changed to automation.

Bottom Line

Continuous delivery is much more than this. However, these few practices is a surefire way to set up your DevOps team for great deployment results. Additionally, online training and certification such as Agile testing, and test automation can assist enterprises bring themselves closer to, and finally achieve, continuous delivery.