When you need more than just continuous integration and continuous delivery, it’s time to explore other options. Cloud services, containerization and VM microservices are all options for expanding your DevOps capabilities.
These options allow you to figure out how to segment systems and networks, how to simplify code patterns, containerize or isolate individualized components into individualized re-buildable environments. For example, let’s say your on a 24-hour call with 70 people getting code out into prod. A typo is discovered in the code, let’s say the company name is misspelled, and no one catches it. You’re not going to have another 70-person phone call to fix that typo. You’re going to have that phone call as infrequently as possible, perhaps once a month. With DevOps, you can fix that type with the a single keystroke. Then you can push the code back out into prod and in less than 30 minutes and the problem is solved. And oh, by the way, that 30 minutes is automated time that doesn’t require a human to do anything.
Remember, the idea behind DevOps is to automate things down to where you can do just that. You’re automating operational processes around secure development. And when you get into more process ops, you can then take even more of the need for a human away from the code. For instance, when tickets move from column to column, what gets released together can be automatically compiled merged, your documentation can be pulled from the tickets an complied for release notes, there is an audit trail of what happened when, the definition of done becomes crystal clear through automated pass/fail. DevOps start starts evolve and reach into agile cycles and you start automating the processes around it as ProcessOps.
What that does iss remove the hurdles around having code sit there and get stale for a month. You enable teams to continuously push and deliver items so that someone could work on a feature or fix a for a few hours, then it could go through automated processes to determine that it’s done. When those processes are done, it goes through additional processes from a DevSecOps perspective to build itself, put itself in an environment, get tested, get security reviewed and QA tested and then move on to prod.
As more and more is automated automat d prod delivery strategies become available where you can use analytical to gauge the success of a release. For instance, a canary release where 20% of your customers get the new feature. You can monitor traffic and ensure for a few hours users are hitting that new feature, and importantly you’re not getting increased customer complaints, there’s no weird errors and nothing is breaking. Once you confidant in the data you can release gradually to more users or you can release wide to everyone.
The majority of this process is automated to where a human doesn’t need to touch anything. It also keeps things in a continual state of modernization because patches happen continuously. Eventually, all things become fragile, outdated and break. But for the most part, adopting DevOps in this fashion will keep you modernized for some time.
Remember, the idea behind DevOps is to automate as much of these processes as possible so that your human employees can focus on items that require knowledge which cannot be automated. Adopting DevOps will make your business more efficient, resulting in a more content workforce and customer base.