Improving your DevOps Processes to Achieve Scale
The DevOps methodology has vastly improved the speed at which businesses can deliver new software and update existing applications. The shift to DevOps has given rise to a proliferation of new tools and platforms designed to improve the way we approach and manage the DevOps pipeline. Despite the fact that there are more tools to choose from than ever before many organizations are finding it more difficult to manage and nearly impossible to scale. Here are two reasons why your CI/CD pipeline could be holding you back.
Eliminate Obstacles to Scaling DevOps
IaC vs. Blueprinting
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform are useful for automating infrastructure, but using IaC alone isn’t sufficient to achieve scale. The main reason IaC isn’t well-suited for enterprise-scale software delivery is because it requires expertise and familiarity in cloud computing and configuration, as well as security and compliance standards and best practices. This broad and complex knowledge base takes many years to acquire, resulting in a scarcity of talent who can execute this function. If these IT professionals have to code each environment individually, this impedes the productivity of development teams, slowing overall project delivery.
Environment blueprinting through Infrastructure Automation speeds the provisioning process without compromising standards and best practices. Once a specific environment has been properly configured, it can then be templated for future reuse by development teams through self-service access. Given that businesses require so many complex environments, the time savings gained by blueprinting environments adds up quickly.
Environment Configurations
For Developers, there is an alternative to waiting on IT Operations teams to get around to individually coding the environments they need. They may attempt to do it themselves which can cause serious problems since they typically lack the expertise, familiarity with the environment toolchain, and best practices associated with environment provisioning. This creates further obstacles to scaling software delivery because inconsistently, or improperly configured environments can introduce bugs which prolong software delivery due to added troubleshooting. It also can introduce security vulnerabilities which, if exploited, could cause immeasurable time to remediate. When cloud experts can build each environment that accommodate the specific toolchains used for those environments, there are fewer chances for errors in that may affect the development process.
Using Infrastructure Automation tools that allow IT Ops to blueprint environments developers avoid environment inconsistencies, poorly built environments, and other issues that can impede production and make it challenging to achieve scale.
For a deeper dive into how to achieve scale for your DevOps efforts, watch our webinar, “Understanding Infrastructure Lifecycle Management and its Role in Scaling Enterprise DevOps”.