When one talks about DevOps, the possibility is unlimited. In fact, it is one of the broadest terms used in the field of software development. Still, if one has to define DevOps, they might define it as the combination of performing 5 different activities.
- Continuous integration
- Cloud infrastructure
- Continuous delivery
- Test automation
- Configuration management
While it is easy to perform these activities but the chances of error while doing these is also huge. Especially when it comes to continuous integration and continuous delivery commonly abbreviated as CI/CD it is the most difficult step to learn. Before moving on, let’s discuss a bit more about CI/CD to get a better understanding.
What is CI (Continuous Integration)?
Continuous Integration, CI is the process in which both development and testing teams come together for validation of a new code. The most common way of doing this is for the developers to write the code and integrate the same for testing once every month. The major issue with this process was that the code that was being tested was a month old and it probably became more troublesome for the developers to resolve the errors being detected while testing. The good news is that the problem was resolved by taking CI on automation. This way the developers could keep testing the code while developing it continuously.
What is CD (Continuous Delivery)?
Coming to Continuous Delivery, CD. This is the process in which companies tend to release the code to the user continuously. The frequency varies from multiple times a day to once a month. This has been made possible because of the cloud environments. For this, the servers are deployed in a way that the production becomes continuous, without having to manually update them.
So, in short, CI/CD is the process that involves continuous development, testing, and delivery of the new codes. Now, nothing in this world is perfect. This process also has certain pitfalls that one should be aware of and avoid to increase the pace as they have done at Facebook and Netflix.
Related post – 10 Best Practices for DevOps Projects
What are these pitfalls we are talking about?
Below, we have listed 5 major pitfalls that one needs to overcome to set their CI/CD pace high effectively.
- Prioritize the automation of Wrong processes
- Avoid the confusion that comes with continuous deployment
- No efficient dashboard available to measure the metrics
- Poor Coordination between CI and CD
- Unbalanced frequency of CI and Resource utilization
Let’s discuss this one by one for better understanding.
1. Prioritize the automation of Wrong processes
While the new organizations hold an advantage of implementing the CI/CD from the very scratch, the old organization may struggle through the transition from the waterfall development method to the new DevOps. One has to understand that the complete transition to the DevOps can take months and might need multiple iterations to function well.
If you are unsure of whether you need to transition from waterfall development to DevOps, here are a few things you must ask yourself to know whether DevOps is for you or not.
- What is the frequency of process repetition?
- What is the duration of the process? How lengthy the process is?
- Are there any delays being witnessed in the CI/CD process?
- If manual processing makes your process prone to errors?
- Is it urgent for you to embed automation?
With the help of this checklist, you can easily figure out whether the DevOps are for you or not.
While you are transitioning the system to CI/CD, make sure you automate functional as well as UI testing. Both can be repeated once a day. It will approximately take up to 2-3 hours for any medium-sized application and the process will involve multiple dependencies. While it is known that functional testing need not be done frequently as UI testing which tends to change more frequently. Still, when it comes to transitioning to DevOps, you must start with the automation of functional testing. The same will be repeated with the environment setups.
2. Avoid the confusion that comes with continuous deployment
You have to understand that the CD (continuous deployment) can create confusion for the users and might scare them away. Understanding the difference between continuous deployment and development is one of the major confusion organizations face. One needs to understand that continuous delivery refers to the process in which every change to the code is passed to the team for deployment. This is when they test it for errors before deploying it. Therefore, when the code is released it is of good quality and is done only after the production team verifies its quality.
3. No efficient dashboard available to measure the metrics
Usually, the team creates the dashboard prior to knowing the metrics you need to track while implementation of CI/CD is processed. This is where things go wrong. Always there is a possibility that during the progressive assessment, one comes to know about the metrics they need to track which then are not available in the dashboard that was designed in the beginning.
Different members of the organization might have different tracking requirements. For instance, a person working in a NOC, Network operation center would love to have traffic light dashboards while some might need a content-rich dashboard. So, clearly setting the dashboard in the first go is nearly impossible. This is something that can be set after investigating the progressive assessment.
4. Poor Coordination between CI and CD
This is the basic requirement of DevOps. The process in which the CI feeds CD. Implementation of a continuous pipeline for integration and delivery might take months & needs full collaboration from the DevOps teams, ops engineers, and scrum masters. This collaboration between humans is the challenge that most organizations face while implementing DevOps. This issue can be resolved with organizations benchmarking your CI/CD process against the best ones in the business.
5. Unbalanced frequency of CI jobs and Resource utilization
Another challenge that comes in a way is the balancing of the frequency of CI and resource utilization. CI has to be triggered for even a small change that is being made to the code. A successful job is when the changes that have no errors are allowed through while the failures are rejected. For this, the developers have to check code in smaller chunks which allows them to trigger more builds in a day. The challenge here is to filter out the unnecessary CI jobs. Every CI job tends to consume resources and because of this, the software needs to be broken down into smaller components to encourage fast-running pipelines. The end goal here is to achieve continuous integration jobs while using an adequate amount of resources.
Do not get carried away. There are a variety of resources and features on the market, the great majority of which may or may not be needed for a specific use case. So, think about what is right for your software delivery and just use the modules that go with it. If there is a segment of the procedure, such as unit testing, which is not robust and has more problems, automate it until it becomes mature; otherwise, you will end up wasting more time than benefit to automating it.
Do not write large testing scripts. Instead, write small scripts with fixed features that you can reuse in your pipeline whenever required.
Execute local unit tests. Before pushing to the central repository, run test cases locally on the developer computer for business-specific scenarios. It adds an additional layer of authentication which assures that there are fewer integration problems.
Build a pipeline that is focused on the method rather than the tools. This is an era of disruption. Software distribution services are increasingly developing. Tools that are adequate today will not be adequate tomorrow (like in a few years). As a response, design architecture in such a way that you are not depending on tools. Make an effort to host the code repository on cloud platforms that have limitless encrypted storage. The other advantage is that the data is held in a single location away from computing machines, making it very simple to switch to new services and applications.
Place the right component in the right place. Place the right stage in the right place based on the use case. The aim must be to save time by starting with the closure of high-failure pipeline components. You would want to package first and then run several test cases in parallel, for example.
Final Thought
Avoid constructing CI/CD in-house. There are several free and low-cost open-source and paid resources available. The key aim of CI/CD is to free up developer resources so that they can be used for more important tasks. In-house systems would necessarily require a significant initial investment as well as ongoing maintenance. The objective of the pipeline should be to make CI/CD as smooth as possible.
Use cloud-native applications. Major cloud providers such as AWS and Azure offer the opportunity to create a full CI/CD pipeline using native or common services. Additionally, go as serverless as possible to save money on regular maintenance and concentrate on performance.