Help is at hand! We can help you overcome these roadblocks with four techniques and tools:  

Tip One: Know the Process

Having one single pathway to product is vital for the implementation of a successful DevOps culture

It’s important to make sure that you have approvals (manual or automated) set up between every stage of the process. Your choice of process automation technology will depend on the ability to model both automated and manual approvals. Even if you want a fully automated continuous delivery platform, it’s better to adopt technology that is able to handle both automated and manual approvals if necessary.

Tip Two: Automate Your Processes

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in development, QA or operations – I’m sure that you’ve all been in the frustrating situation where it works on your machine but errors are occurring in another environment.

So what can we do to avoid this? If development and operations work closely together, there shouldn’t be any surprises about the choice or architecture or hardware. Close collaboration should enable operations to provide environments that very closely reflect the production environments. Virtualization is key! You need to be able to spin up instances on demand in order to avoid hardware-driven bottlenecks. If you give developers environments that closely resemble production, you can test changes against properly configured environments in the early stages of the deployment process.

Tip Three: Enable Reproducible Deployments

There are many different types of deployment automation. At the very least, most people have some kind of basic script to perform deployment automation at some level. As architectures and environments increase in complexity, so do the scripts. However, the scripts don’t always work for all of the environments and the authors are often too busy to maintain them once they’ve become too complex. Writing scripts in order to handle integrations to multiple systems and deploy products isn’t usually a core competency in a company.

Luckily, there are tools on the market like Puppet and Chef which give the ability to perform many low level operations easily. However, there is still a need for deployment automation that can integrate all aspects of the software development lifecycle. Custom integrations can be complex, time-consuming and fragile but they are critical in establishing and maintaining end-to-end traceability.

Tip Four: Put all the Pieces Together

Most companies won’t throw out technologies that are already set in place. Most deployment automation tools can handle integrations when applications are being deployed but there are many ‘touch points’ in the process. These include: issue tracking, continuous integration, test automation, requirements management and application monitoring. The process management layer should be capable of exchanging information by receiving information or pulling it from another system. With the higher-level process management framework in place, you have ensured traceability

All of the tips and techniques listed above will help you get on the path to being a DevOps ‘Ninja’. They will help you remove your deployment roadblocks and eliminate your problems easily and with minimum effort.

This article, Want to be a DevOps “Ninja”?, is based on an original post in DevOps Angle.

The webinar, DevOps Best Practices: Canary Deployments, was delivered at the beginning of March by Dr. Jacob Ukelson. Hundreds of people signed up for this webinar, which turned out to be an educational and instructive presentation on canary deployments followed by a lively Q&A session.

In the webinar, Dr. Ukelson demonstrated how you can use canary deployments to lower risks in your application releases, perform A/B testing and enable rollbacks to previous versions.  He showed viewers how to implement this advanced application release technique and used real life examples to demonstrate how to: 

• Significantly lower risks throughout your deployment process
• Test features on a subset of users
• Roll out new releases incrementally rather than upgrading a whole environment to the latest version all at once.
• Perform A/B testing to quickly validate the utility of new features on a subset of end users

This webinar was a huge success so we’ve put it online to make sure that no-one misses out! This was the first in our series of webinars on DevOps Best Practices. Our next one is penciled in for mid April so stay tuned for further details!  

View the webinar: DevOps Best Practices: Canary Deployments.

View our library of ‘On-Demand’ webinars.

Want to find out more about DevOps? Check out our series of blog posts Part I and Part II – which offer tips on DevOps Best Practices.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Dr. Jacob Ukelson

Dr. Ukelson has a proven track record in discovering and developing innovative solutions to real-world customer problems, and then developing them into products. Dr. Ukelson has already delivered many fascinating and educational webinars on key subjects for DevOps and application release professionals. Previous webinars include:  “Increase SaaS Efficiency: Focus on Windows Azure”, “What DevOps Looks Like in the Enterprise”, “The Future of IT Release Operations”, and “Enterprise Application Elasticity with Hybrid Clouds”.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll have already read our first installment on the top five DevOps Best Practice Tips. Here’s the second installment of DevOps Best Practice tips 5-10. 

Click here for DevOps Best Practice Tips 1-5

Best Practice Tip # 6: Integrated Planning

For development teams, deployment planning has always involved some interaction with the operations team.  If you’re adopting a DevOps strategy, you need to take this one step further. DevOps requires developers to continuously and actively involve all stakeholders when planning deployments. Some development teams are very used to working in siloed environments and this approach has to change. If you’re not already vying for release slots in your organization’s deployment schedule, you need to start doing this now! What’s more, release engineers should increase the number of available release slots in order to support these continuous deployments.

Best Practice Tip #7: Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment is an extension of continuous integration. Continuous integration means that when your integration is successful in one sandbox, your changes are automatically promoted to the next sandbox, and integration is automatically started there. This automatic promotion continues until you reach the point where changes require verification by an actual person. This is typically at the transition point between development and operations.

Continuous deployment allows development teams to cut the time between the identification of a new feature and its deployment into production. This helps the business to be more productive and responsive.

Best Practice Tip #8: ‘Level Three’ Support

In many cases, development teams are working on new releases of a solution that is already in production. This means that they need to work on the release and simultaneously address production issues. As the development team is often the third and final team to work on solving critical production issues, they are often referred to as ‘level three support’. The need for level three production support is common but many agile methods don’t seriously address this effort. However, it is important as it means that developers gain an appreciation of problems that occur in production, meaning they can improve the way that they initially design their solutions.

Best Practice Tip #9: Monitoring Applications

This means monitoring applications and running solutions once they are in production. Many operating systems, communication services and application servers provide monitoring capabilities that can be leveraged by various tools on the market. But if you want to monitor application-specific functionality – such which instrumentation is compliant with your company’s monitoring infrastructure or user types – you’ll need to build it into the applications.

Best Practice Tip #10: Use Automated Dashboards

This is business intelligence (BI) for IT! It has two aspects:  development intelligence and operational intelligence. Development intelligence requires using development tools like configuration management (CM) platforms to generate metrics on what has been checked in and when. Continuous integration tools can record when a build has occurred, the number of tests run etc. This type of data can be displayed and analyzed in automated dashboards.

Operational intelligence is a part of the application monitoring that we’ve already discussed. By using automated dashboards, an organization can dramatically reduce its overall metrics overhead and enjoy real-time insights to its governance teams.

Want to learn more about best practices in DevOps? Join our webinar series on DevOps best practices. Our first webinar on Canary Deployments was held last week. Click here to view it online and stay tuned for the next one!

On Wednesday the 6^th of March Dr. Jacob Ukelson will kick off the first webinar in our new series on DevOps Best Practices! This first webinar will be an educational session on Canary deployments.

Canary deployments enable you to:

• Lower risks in your application releases
• Perform A/B testing to quickly validate the utility of new features on a subset of end users
• Rapidly enable rollbacks to previous versions
• Roll out new releases incrementally rather than upgrading a whole environment to the latest version all at once

We’ve put a ‘sneak preview’ of this webinar online so you can get an idea of we have in store for you.

So join us in two days to learn how to implement canary deployments for complex enterprise applications.  The presentation will include a live demonstration and it will be followed by a question and answer session. So you can start thinking now about the questions that you want to ask Dr Ukelson on this subject!

The webinar ‘DevOps Best Practices: Canary Deployments’ will be held at 8am PST/11am EST/4pm GMT on Wednesday, March 6, 2013. Register now!

This is the first in our series of webinars on best practices in DevOps. Stay tuned for details on our next webinar!

View our library of ‘On-Demand’ webinars.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Dr. Jacob Ukelson

Dr. Ukelson has a proven track record in discovering and developing innovative solutions to real-world customer problems, and then developing them into products. Dr. Ukelson has already delivered many fascinating and educational webinars on key subjects for DevOps and application release professionals. Previous webinars include:  “Increase SaaS Efficiency: Focus on Windows Azure”, “What DevOps Looks Like in the Enterprise”, “The Future of IT Release Operations”, and “Enterprise Application Elasticity with Hybrid Clouds”.

In our two part blog series on ‘DevOps Best Practice Tips’, we will show you how to work more collaboratively, operate more efficiently and produce cleaner code. In this first post, we will cover five important practices that you should adopt if you want to make DevOps work!

Best Practice Tip #1: All Stakeholders Must Participate

One of DevOps’ most important principles is that developers, operations and support staff should all work closely together.  Each one needs to be seen as an important stakeholder and, as such, employees from all the teams must participate and strive to work closely with one another to ensure the best results.

Best Practice Tip #2: Implement Automated Testing

Sometimes agile software developers are referred to as ‘quality infected’ due to their focus on writing code and their need to test it as early and often as possible. This means that agile teams frequently adopt automated regression testing, which can even lead to ‘test-first’ approaches like behavior-driven development and test-driven development. As agile teams often run automated test suites multiple times a day and fix emergent problems immediately, they tend to produce enjoy higher quality levels than teams that don’t take this approach. This approach is better for operations as they need to ensure the quality of a solution before it can be released into production.

Best Practice Tip # 3: Take an Integrated Configuration Management Approach

By taking an integrated approach to configuration management, developers are forced to consider production configuration issues between their solution and the infrastructure of the entire organization. This can be a huge step for some developers, who only think about configuration management in terms of their own solution. Taking the entire organization into consideration fits with a DevOps culture, which requires developers to look at the bigger picture and not just their own tasks and projects.

Best Practice Tip # 4: Take an Integrated Change Management Approach

Change management means successfully developing the IT infrastructure in order to support the organization more effectively.  This can be incredibly complex from a DevOps perspective as it brings enterprise-level issues into the mix; you need to consider a huge number of solutions simultaneously running in production. With an integrated change management approach, developers are required to work closely with operations in order to fully understand the implications of technological changes at a company level.  In order to do this, they must successfully adopt all of the ‘Best Practice’ tips above.

Best Practice Tip # 5: Implement Continuous Integration

Continuous integration involves building and validating a project whenever updated or new code is checked into the version control system. This is done by automated regression testing and sometimes code analysis.  By implementing continuous integration, developers can develop a high-quality solution in small, frequent steps by providing immediate feedback on code defects.

Did you find these five tips useful? Don’t forget to log on to our blog next week for our second installment on DevOps Best Practices!

You can also find out more about best practices in DevOps in our new monthly webinar series. Our first webinar focusing on Canary Deployments will be held next Wednesday the 6^th of March at 11am EST/4pm GMT.  Register here

This post, DevOps Best Practice Tips: Part One, is based on an original article on Dr. Dobbs.

In the past, Dev and Ops were distinctly separate and often at odds with one another. They had been working side by side for a long time but collisions and fights frequently occurred. Dev kept making decisions and changes without fully involving Ops, Ops was controlling and couldn’t always keep up with the rapid pace instigated by Dev.

But in recent years Dev and Ops decided to unite and it looks like this new relationship is set to last.

Here are seven reasons why DevOps is a good union:

• Development is more iterative, meaning small changes are made frequently instead of large changes every so often. This lowers the risks and stresses of application deployments
• It ensures more rapid development and deployment cycles – but also ensures that it doesn’t move too fast for one side to cope with
• It increases flexibility when it comes to automation and repeatability of deployment tasks
• Interaction and communication is maximized; DevOps ensures that all team members on both sides of the chain (development and operations) are kept in the loop
• It helps standardize all development environments
• It ensures that everyone has a clearer view of the ‘big picture’. This simplifies application support dramatically.
• It helps improve testing and troubleshooting of applications and updates.

Have you adopted DevOps practices in your organization? If so, you might find our new webinar series on DevOps Best Practices valuable! We’re kicking off the series on Wednesday the 6^th of March with a session on canary deployments. In this webinar, you will learn how to implement canary deployments in order to lower risks, execute A/B testing and more! Register now.

This post, DevOps: A Modern-Day Love Story?, is based on an original article on Stackify.

The article appears in this month’s edition of the ALM Mag – an e-mag covering key topics in application lifecycle management (ALM), DevOps, TFS, testing and configuration management and deployment.

In the article, Dr. Ukelson studies the cloud from an operational perspective with respect to applications. He explores the value of cloud in its ability to provide application delivery as an agile production line from development to delivery.

“Cloud holds the promise of being able to provide much more than a physical production line – application update lifecycles will be days or hours, not months or years. I think as this picture becomes whole – it will drastically change the way we think about applications.”
Dr. Jacob Ukelson

Dr. Ukelson specifically focuses on what happens after the application is assumed to be ready for release. He studies the two key options that we have when a problem with an application deployment is identified: “fight” or “flight”.  “Fight” means deploying additional resources, whereas “flight” involves rollback to a previous version of the application.  He explores in detail the consequences and implications of each of these high level decisions.

He concludes the article by exploring the notion of DevOps and “AppOpps” – focusing specifically on how they interconnect, how they differ and why it is important to separate them. Click here to read Dr. Ukelson’s full article ‘Enterprise Application Delivery and the Cloud’.

Dr. Ukelson will be delivering next month’s webinar on best practices in DevOps. The webinar, “DevOps Best Practices: Canary Deployments”, will be held on Wednesday March 6, at 11am EST/4pm GMT. Register now 

Dr Ukelson’s article is featured in Volume 1, Issue 2 of the ALM Mag. Click here to subscribe.

About Dr. Ukelson

Dr. Ukelson has a proven track record in discovering and developing innovative solutions to real-world customer problems, and then developing them into products.

Canary deployments enable you to lower risks in your application releases, perform A/B testing and rapidly enable rollbacks to previous versions. In a live webinar on Wednesday, March 6, Dr. Jacob Ukelson will show you how to implement this advanced application release technique for complex enterprise applications.  Taking real life examples, he will demonstrate how you can:

• Significantly lower risks throughout your deployment process
• Test features on a subset of users
• Roll out new releases incrementally rather than upgrading a whole environment to the latest version all at once.
• Perform A/B testing to quickly validate the utility of new features on a subset of end users

This presentation will include a live demonstration and it will be followed by a question and answer session. So you can start thinking now about the questions that you want to ask Dr Ukelson on this subject!

The webinar ‘DevOps Best Practices: Canary Deployments’ will be held at 8am PST/11am EST/4pm GMT on Wednesday, March 6, 2013. Register now!

This is the first in our series of webinars on best practices in DevOps. Stay tuned for details on our next webinar!

View our library of ‘On-Demand’ webinars.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Dr. Jacob Ukelson

Dr. Ukelson has a proven track record in discovering and developing innovative solutions to real-world customer problems, and then developing them into products. Dr. Ukelson has already delivered many fascinating and educational webinars on key subjects for DevOps and application release professionals. Previous webinars include:  “Increase SaaS Efficiency: Focus on Windows Azure”, “What DevOps Looks Like in the Enterprise”, “The Future of IT Release Operations”, and “Enterprise Application Elasticity with Hybrid Clouds”.

Why Adopt DevOps Practices?

Adopting DevOps practices isn’t always easy. Not only do you need to increase the frequency and quality of your releases – but you also need to change the entire culture of your teams. You need to get everyone on board and ready to be more aligned, more communicative and open to the idea of implementing tools to facilitate the change.

So why do it? Most companies are spurred on by release management issues. By gradually adopting DevOps practices, you can dramatically improve the frequency and quality of your application releases. Even taking the first step towards a DevOps culture can lead to a less-siloed and more integrated company.

Release Management is Key to DevOps

When it comes to DevOps, release management is key. For many businesses, the first time that developers and operations employees interact is when developers deploy their applications on the infrastructure owned by operations. However, even if this is the very first time that these two teams interact, you can take steps to improve your release management.

Here are some useful tips on how Navy Federal Credit Union made this work:

1. Use a Structured Process for Code Changes
Navy Federal refused to make ad-hoc changes demanded by the company. Instead, they set up a clear and structured process and used change management tickets in a central repository.

2. Code Changes Must have a ‘Business Case’
Every time a manager wanted to make a code change, they needed to consider what the impact the change would have on the business and prove that it was worthwhile.

3. Facilitate Simultaneous Developments
It’s a waste of time and resources to keep your development team stuck on just one project. Be brave and manage simultaneous developments on multiple projects.

4. Execute User Acceptance Testing in a Pre-Production Environment
Software releases are vital and should be tested thoroughly to ensure they run smoothly.  Navy Federal didn’t take any chances and dedicated 70 of its employees to process of rolling out software.

5. And Finally – Plan for Rollback
You might want to pray it doesn’t happen but it’s always best to be prepared.

Every single one of these steps will significantly improve your release management processes – putting you on a smoother path to a successful DevOps operation.

Find out more about DevOps in the Enterprise here.

As you know, we’re committed to providing you with the most valuable material in the field of continuous application delivery. In fact, we’ve already got a rich library of whitepapers covering a wide range of topics. We’re dedicated to providing you with educational information to keep you up-to-date, ahead of the field and enable you to implement the best possible working processes. We make sure that you’re always updated but we also want to know the areas that you want to learn more about.

That’s why we want you to cast your vote. Nolio’s next whitepaper will cover the topic of your choice – you just have to make sure that your voice is heard.

Take our poll below and let us know which of the following topics you’d like to learn more about:

If your answer is ‘None of the Above’, we want to hear what you do want to learn about. Send an email to clare@noliosoft.com with your suggestions.

Don’t forget to check out our library of existing whitepapers if you want to download educational material instantly.

I also wanted to remind you that we’re holding a webinar today, Tuesday, February 12, on achieving continuous application delivery in dynamic environments. This webinar will start at 11am EST/4pm GMT and will you need to know about improving efficiency when deploying applications.