At OpsMx, we work towards delivering value to organizations by assisting them in adopting DevOps methodologies. We are available throughout the journey of their transformative process. We understand that delivering fast is essential to stay competitive and thrive in the market. Hence, we encourage organizations to adopt a CI/CD pipeline to meet their business demands. A CI/CD is a series of steps that includes all the stages from the outset of the CI/CD process and creates automated and seamless software delivery.
CI and CD enable organizations to test rapidly and deploy applications by automating the different stages of the release cycle. However, to ensure the success of reaping the maximum benefits of a CI/CD pipeline, we must tackle the top three challenges that may bottleneck the smooth flow of code.
The three challenges to overcome in a CI/CD framework are:
Organizations that are automating individual stages in separate CI and CD workflows to deliver software fast using tools, end up rendering the DevOps toolchain into a complex and unwieldy process. A connected CICD is going to benefit the entire enterprise, and it needs to be treated with utmost importance. OpsMx has listed three key challenges that organizations must face to make their foundation strong.
- Focusing on Release Quality not just Velocity
- Addressing Security and Compliance issues
- Unlocking release velocity
1. Focusing on release quality, and not just velocity
“Release quality: A Key Indicator of good Software Delivery and Operational Performance”
Per the annual state of DevOps Report, one of the most efficient ways to compare your DevOps maturity and overall software delivery performance is with Release Quality.
Velocity isn’t everything. Quality is equally important. With pressure to improve release velocity, releases have become prone to errors. A successful product release involves several interdependencies, multiple teams, and complex technological challenges. Applying point solutions to address issues as on when they arrive is not a sustainable and long-term solution. Here are four issues that can increase the focus on release quality:
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- Automating feedback loops
Sometimes developers work in a silo and are consciously improving from a point of view that they think is right. But without actual business and customer feedback, developers cannot prioritize their development ideas. The absence of a high-frequency feedback loop will slow GTM and not cater to accrual business needs.
- Automating feedback loops
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- Documentation
Documentation sets clear acceptance criteria that are critical for a release. Teams that ignore this process and rush to complete a release end up making errors and unnecessary changes, which may cause surprises at later stages, where errors are difficult to correct.
- Documentation
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- Battle Testing
Organizations need to invest in tools like the OpsMx Intelligent Software Delivery platform that can recreate production issues inside the four walls of the testing environment. ISD helps teams battle test and harden releases with insightful data-driven risk verification, policy enforcement, and approvals to ensure quality, risk-free and compliant software in production.
- Battle Testing
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- Eliminating script scripting
Maintaining test scripts and executing them is a very cumbersome task. It is resource intensive and prone to errors, this only increases the cost of testing, not the efficacy. Organizations must invest in platforms that help them automate the entire value chain and automate deployment from code complete to Multi-cloud.
- Eliminating script scripting
How does OpsMx ISD improve your engineering efficiency?
OpsMx ISD integrates at a granular level of your pipeline and gathers insights from your delivery teams and the engineers responsible for reliability. With instant feedback mechanisms, developers can keep a track of issues and feedback in real-time.
ISD gathers data from various CI/CD tools, APM, and log analyzers and applies supervised and unsupervised Machine Learning techniques to find and report software risks throughout the software delivery pipeline. Correlation of data, metrics, and logs in the pipeline’s context provides best-in-class diagnostic capabilities
Read more about how OpsMx ISD can help you improve your release quality.
2. Addressing Security and compliance issues
Security may not be the number one priority for organizations. This is a reason we see an ever-increasing rise in security breaches and vulnerabilities. To make a CI/CD pipeline secure and compliant, one does not have to compromise on release velocity when partnered with OpsMx.
Maintaining security is time-consuming and laborious. Traditionally, security has been approached in a siloed way where all the responsibility has been hurled upon the security team. But security can become a shared responsibility for everyone in the value chain.
How does OpsMx ISD harden your delivery pipeline?
To be able to share the responsibility across the stakeholders of the pipeline, OpsMx ISD enforces dynamic policies with a full audit trail. In addition, the gates are automated with ML that can clear up to an intermediate level of security checks.
The security framework of OpsMx ISD is laid on the zero-trust fundamental principles that help in defining the policies for the pipeline. Automation takes the uncertainty out of DevSecOps. Automated scans can also advise corrective options that the assigned owners can quickly sift through, ensuring pipeline velocity is not hampered. DevSecOps will be key that will foster collaboration and avoid late handoffs to security professionals.
With DevSecOps, there will be cases where an issue is detected at the last minute of release, but the probability of that happening will be drastically lower. Over time, DevSecOps will bring down the count of last-minute failures and save a lot of money for the organization. The added security in your delivery process enhances credibility in the market and builds trust with customers.
In an environment without DevSecOps, a release may be insecure at the last step, causing last-minute firefighting and a lot of unhappy customers. The impact sometimes is a tarnished brand image.
Read more on how OpsMx ISD can help you meet those rigorous security standards.
3. Unlocking release velocity
The promise of DevOps is to ship code in small and frequent deployments. Hence, deployment velocity is used as a vital sign of an organization’s DevOps health. Organizations with a fast development velocity can deliver value to customers by discovering and fixing customer needs.
Development velocity can be directly correlated to the maturity index of DevOps practices in an organization. Measuring velocity over time helps teams determine problems in workflows or processes.
“Development Frequency: A Key Indicator of High Performance”
Per the annual state of DevOps Report, the most efficient way to compare your performance with the industry standard is with development velocity.
The cloud-native architecture journey transforms organizations from monolithic applications to containerized microservice applications. OpsMx helps customers deliver an ever-increasing volume of smaller releases. The ISD platform helps eliminate waste and friction by removing complexities and thus optimizing velocity.
How does OpsMx ISD harden your delivery pipeline?
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- OpsMx ISD Saas can get your organization started in minutes. With our pre-defined templates for pipeline, developers can start pushing codes from day 1. We have taken it further with pre-defined deployment strategies like Canary or Blue-Green that fast forward your release journey.
- Declarative pipelines speed up build and testing.
- ISD is cloud native and can easily integrate with multiple cloud vendors with simple REST API calls.
- Real-time visibility into the deployment pipeline allows DevOps to keep track of minute details that may form a bottleneck in the system. Data from each stage can be used as a trend line to support a project for continuous improvement.
Read more on how to unlock the sports more of your software delivery.
Conclusion :
To have a performing CI/CD pipeline, organizations need to have the right people and process technology and mindset. We at OpsMx can help you with the right resources and training so that you don’t have to worry about your software pipeline. Reach out to us if you’re facing any kind of issue with your pipeline.
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