All companies (Big/small/startup)
want to adopt to CICD because it helps to accelerated time to market (step
ahead of the competition), improved productivity and efficiency and improved
customer satisfaction and so on. New organizations have the benefit of
implementing CICD from scratch. Existing companies have to drive steadily from
manual/semi-automated to highly automated development.
Continuous Delivery is a modern
software development/release practices and principles aimed at building,
testing and releasing software faster and more frequently. Building a
successful CD pipeline means creating a DevOps culture of collaboration among
the various teams involved in software delivery (developers, operations,
quality assurance teams, management, etc.), as well as reducing the cost, time,
and risk of delivering software changes by allowing for more incremental
updates to applications in production.
Challenges:
Identifying and mitigating any
challenges early in the CICD implementation will help you to head start the
project as well as help you to address future challenges. Most common challenges of enterprise:
Process Change: Most of the company has their own change control
process handoff, Signoff, change control approval process and it takes its own
time to approve. Identify the delayed
process and come up with acceptable solutions and fast forward solutions.
Technical Challenges: For
CICD, we will be using more third party tools and APIs. Avoid vendor lock-in
for third party software, harden the security of open source software, and
develop widely accepting standards and procedures for API and plugins. Automation process needs its own testing and
error handling properly to avoid any quality degradation in the pipeline.
Frequent script changes are error-prone and need to be avoided.
Organization change:
Organization need to make cultural change of Agile CICD model across the
company. Teams would have worked
independently and worked on own timeline but with new Agile CICD model
collaborative approach needs to be engaged in defined timeline. The leadership team need to restructure the
organization to break down barriers among teams and promote a collaborative
culture.
Automation of CICD pipeline: (Need not to be same and depends on
the organization requirement).
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Maintain a Single Source Repository.
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Automate the Build
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Make Your Build Self-Testing
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Everyone Commits To the Mainline Every Day
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Every Commit Should Build the Mainline on an
Integration Machine
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Deployment to integration environment
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Integration tests
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Scenario/regression tests
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Deployments to UAT and Performance test
environment
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More scenario/regression tests
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Performance tests
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Alerts, reports and Release Notes sent out
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Deployment to release repository
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Deploy to production
Source Control Management: Source control management tools provide
the ability to store separate versions of things, including the ability to
manage variation through branching and merging.
Tools: Git, Subversion,
Mercurial, Veracity, TFS, ISPW
Continuous Integration: integration is a software development
practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central
repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.
Tools: Jenkins, codeship,
Teamcity,continuum, Travis CI, CircleCI, Bamboo, Visual Studio, shippable
Build automation: Build automation tools are software applications
that automate the compilation and integration of executable software components
from source code.
Tools: Maven, Gradle, Ant, Gulp,
Cmake, MSbuild
Artifact Repository: Artifact repository tools are used to store
and manage binary objects that are used to build software.
Tools: Dockerhub, npm, Nexus,
Artifactory
Continuous delivery: Continuous Delivery simply builds on this
foundation and extends it more into the domain of deployment and project
delivery.
Tools: Jmeter,
Cucumber,Junit,Mocha,Selenium,Qunit,TestING, Jasmine, Karma,Qunit.LoadRunner,
WebLoad, Testing Anywhere
Configuration & provisioning:
Configuration management tool automates deployment of just about any
infrastructure and application stack used to create modern cloud and enterprise
IT.
Tools: Chef, Ansible,
Salt,CFengine, puppet, Terraform, vagrant
Application Security: Application security solutions need to be naturally
integrated into the CICD workflow.
Tools: HPE Fortify, Tripwire, Snort
Application logging:
Application logging system helps to troubleshoot application problems
and investigate security incidents in minutes instead of hours or days, avoid
service degradation or outages, deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new
business insights.
Tools: Logstash, Splunk,
SumoLogic, Logentries
Application monitoring: Application monitoring needed for the
entire system to ensure systems, applications, services, and business processes
are functioning properly. In the event of a failure, system can alert technical
staff of the problem, allowing them to begin remediation processes before
outages affect business processes, end-users, or customers.
Tools: Nagios, Zabbix, NewRelic,
Appdynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace
Closing statement:
Identifying the common challenges
to put CICD into practice, evaluate the situation should be a first preparatory
step in your implementation. Gain an accurate picture of the current baseline process,
structure of your implementation in measurable phases, and then work on dealing
with these challenges to clear the way for your first delivery pipelines. Integration tools tie together from multiple
vendors into a single integrated tool chain, ensuring data consistency and
integrity is important. Don’t need to automate the entire system at once, implement
automation in phased approach. Good luck with your CICD Move!