DevOps and Cloud Services

• Intro meeting: discuss the project details, agree on project requirements, and make sure they are complete.
• Discovery and analysis: assess the current architecture, infrastructure, and processes along with the existing hardware and software, identify the performance bottlenecks and the room for improvement.
• Continuously updated plan: develop a step-by-step roadmap to optimize the existing IT infrastructure, security, and resource usage.
• DevOps adoption: map out the DevOps culture building and adoption plan for all organizational levels, from stakeholders to employees.

• Environment automation: establish a robust automation environment for builds, continuous integration & deployment.
• Configuration: automated configuration and continuous management of servers, testing, staging, and production environments.
• Security: regular security audits of networks, environments, and applications.
• Load balancing and autoscaling.

• Pull request: run changes through the CI/CD pipeline by committing finished pieces of code to a code repository and submitting a pull request to merge this piece with a shared codebase.
• Code review: review submitted changes and approve the pull request if everything looks smooth. The manual test is quick and easy, but effective at identifying issues in the far reaches.
• Automated tests: a pull request triggers an automated process, which builds the codebase and runs a series of end-to-end, integration and unit tests to identify any regressions. If the build or any of the tests fail, the pull request is denied and the piece of code is returned to the developer for revision. By continuously checking code changes and running builds and tests, we can minimize integration issues that arise when working on a shared codebase, harness collaboration enabling parallel development, and highlight breaking bugs early in the development lifecycle.
• Repeat: the cycle of running a source code through various processes to ensure it’s in good fix will repeat until the code is ready.

• Automatic deployment: once a build is approved, it is automatically deployed to a staging (test) environment for scrupulous out-of-band testing. A series of manual — User Acceptance Testing (UAT) — and automated tests — security scanning, performance, regression, smoke, black/white box, and load testing — are performed there along with the environment configuration validation.
• Information exchange: ensure proper information exchange between all system components.
• Pre-production tests: ensure the optimal code performance in the staging environment by creating a precise replica of the production environment.

You may think of this stage as a test-bed for new changes testing without interrupting developers workflow or affecting the production environment.

This stage is an extension of the continuous integration one in that it ensures that all code changes get automatically deployed to a testing environment after development. Hence the reduced deployment risk: as an organization is deploying in smaller increments, there are fewer things that can go wrong and it’s easier to fix an issue should it appear. Furthermore, continuous deployment enables fast and continuous feedback from User Acceptance testers.

Another purpose of continuous deployment is to automate and manage the provisioning and configuration of deployment environments, as well as testing of these environments for stability, performance and security compliance.

This phase is a milestone of the DevOps pipeline: it’s when we say the build is ready for deployment into the production environment. By this stage, each code change has passed a series of manual and automated tests, and the operations team can be confident that breaking issues and regressions are unlikely.

This is the nirvana of DevOps and is how organizations manage to deploy multiple product versions daily.

• Pre-launch checklist: double-check everything from the ground up and go through the pre-launch checklist to make sure the product is fully functional.
• Launch: deploy to production and monitor the performance.

Continuous feedback ties the ends of the SDLC loop, supplying data and analytics for continuous planning, thus is just as important as CI and CD.

• Operations: make sure that everything is running like clockwork.
• Funnel feedback: build a way for users to provide feedback along with the toolset to collect and triage it for further planning. Nobody knows what they want better than users, they are the world’s best testing team, devoting far more hours to testing than the DevOps pipeline ever could.

Along with building a powerful continuous feedback loop, the point of DevOps culture is to release new features and fixes as quickly as possible so that the organization can collect feedback from customers, stakeholders, and analysts as quickly as possible to make better decisions when designing the next set of changes and eventually create a better product.