DevOps and CI/CD

DevOps goals

Every company wants its IT to be able to place new, high-quality solutions and functionality on the market at speed. To do that, they must always be able to write and deploy code for the application, ensure short lead times, maintain stability and quality at the highest level, minimise errors and defects through automation and testing, and get systems back up and running again quickly following any downtime.

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DevOps dimensions

Reaching DevOps goals requires an interplay between theory and practice from many areas and disciplines. To shorten release cycles and improve software quality, your teams will need to specify criteria and benchmarks to measure continual improvement. And you can accelerate and stabilise processes by increasing automation and applying it more radically. For DevOps to grow from a solid foundation, staff will need to switch their perspective to take a big-picture view of the whole process and the overall scope of the solutions. By introducing a culture and way of working that involves processing feedback on the solution from the operations team and users, DevOps can take software engineering to a new level of quality.

DevOps implementation

A DevOps implementation can be triggered from various quarters. It may be prompted for technology reasons, if an increasing number of components and the complexity of a growing infrastructure can only be managed with advanced automation. Or an initiative that begins by focusing on processes and organisation may trigger the expansion of DevOps to encourage a new working culture that promotes measurable added value by broadening and sharing knowledge.

CI/CD

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are at the heart of automation in the software engineering process. CI/C is the most important technical pillar for stabilising and improving every software development process. Every time source code is pushed into the version control system, software must be built and tests performed with test data that is transparent and secure. The resulting artefact must be stored in a repository and then rolled out automatically to the first environments. Only with these and other automatic functions can you guarantee that the code for a solution is operable, the infrastructure stable, and the overall solution is of a certified and sustainable quality.

Faced with digitalisation, the cloud, IT modernisation or a cultural transformation in IT, many organisations are currently asking themselves what they should do first. In our article, we discuss DevOps First or Container First – Strategies for a Successful Introduction:

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DevOps implementation

When you implement a DevOps approach and culture, it can often challenge established habits. Changing these is a lengthy process. ARS has supported numerous customers as they implement DevOps. We start by looking at the initiatives that the customer’s company already has in place and understanding its context and ways of working. Then we work with the customer to develop and deploy suitable measures for implementing DevOps. Depending on where the company stands in relation to DevOps, the implementation could focus on automation topics, or on topics that place processes, culture and ways of working at the forefront.

CI/CD

At the heart of automation and technical safeguarding of quality and speed are the continuous integration and continuous delivery systems (CI/CD). ARS has more than a decade of experience of working with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins. We offer customers our expertise to help them manage, build and deliver a growing infrastructure and increasing number of projects, artefacts and services.

CI/CD for the cloud

If a company enhances a standard on-premise infrastructure by adding cloud technologies, e.g., by implementing Kubernetes clusters as a platform for cloud-native applications, and possibly also adds public clouds to its infrastructure portfolio, it will have to manage and automate a heterogeneous infrastructure. ARS develops uniform CI/CD solutions for managing heterogeneous infrastructures with state-of-the-art automation tools.

GitOps

GitOps is a new, declarative approach to infrastructure, which promotes stability and reliability in growing infrastructures. GitOps principles make it easier to manage Kubernetes clusters and the services and applications on them. ARS helps customers sound out the added value of this new strategy in workshops and PoCs, and then implement it.