Gauging Your Continuous Delivery Maturity

Gauging Your Continuous Delivery Maturity
Gauging Your Continuous Delivery Maturity

So, your company has chosen DevOps as its delivery technique. How would you know whether your adoption and implementation are mature? How would you know whether your adoption and implementation are mature? Perhaps you are present, or there are still some needs to be met. We’d like to shine some light on certain indicators of the maturity of your practices, as well as identify some areas where improvement may be required.

Although DevOps dimensions and their implications might seem multitudinous. Some organizations opt for comprehensive coding platforms with transparent DevOps capabilities integrated by default. When a tool like amplication.com, for example, is utilized, all committed changes are continuously deployed to a sandbox environment in the cloud, allowing teams to easily access their application for testing and development. Improving the overall efficiency and maturity of the DevOps approach in use by the organization.

Often organizations view their DevOps approach as static policy-bound application development and deployment paradigm. Though, DevOps needs to be closer to a dynamic entity. Living, moving, and evolving with the organization.

We will examine the following fundamental indicators of DevOps maturity in an organization.

Source Code Management and Versioning

Typically, source code repositories are used to hold code sets that are ready for deployment. These code sets can then be pushed into or extracted from the repository. Departments should be able to get correct version control from repositories. These repositories are typically designed to improve the speed and integrity of distributed data dissemination.

Build Automation

The iterative integration of software changes into development, testing, and production environments is promoted by CI/CD. Every time a new code is added, the integration must be properly tested. This is possible with automated technologies. Automated tests are intended to detect new problems and confirm that existing errors have been corrected. Many integration challenges can be avoided in this manner, increasing the deployment process’s efficiency.

Shift Left and Shift Right Application Testing

To assure the quality of all products released, development teams should be supported by effective testing frameworks. Software testing automation tools can be implemented, allowing organizations to orchestrate application testing into scheduled testing. Shift-left and shift-right application testing have now become essential parts of Agile software development, allowing teams to develop and deliver software progressively and consistently while also analyzing it at various stages throughout the development cycle.

Database change management

Database modifications are just as critical as code changes for a successful deployment. Manually publishing database modifications after the fact is a formula for disaster. The database is often a significant impediment as developers strive to improve the capacity and efficiency of software modifications. No increase in Database administration manpower could expand the manual technique to keep up with application upgrades as long as database operations remain a manual approach. To eliminate the DB impediment, teams must implement full DB automation and approach database code comparable to software deployment automation.

Pipeline Orchestration

Automation technologies can fully organize software deployment from development to diverse settings. These tools can also be set up to deliver notifications in response to predetermined triggers.

Provisioning and deployment

It is critical that infrastructures remain in sync in terms of infrastructure standards. Having several environments introduces unproven performance issues into the application experience. Furthermore, development teams need to be able to rely on their development platforms and tools to efferently and reliably build applications.

Applied governance

Reports and dashboarding tools can help to streamline governance during deployment. The tools must be capable of responding to predetermined situations and triggers. Modern DevOps monitoring tools can evaluate and apply regulatory compliance in real-time. Whether it has to do with data masking or applying fundamental data categorization to multiple disparate unstructured data sources.

Conclusion

Organizations who want to drive the maturity of their DevOps practices should examine all the dimensions of their development to deployment into SaaS environments. The following factors should be represented: Actions and events need to be completely traceable and auditable. Feedback should be delivered in as close to real-time as possible. Organizations need to invest in trigger-based workflow orchestration for DevOps processes, and finally, development teams need to understand that reliable source and versioning is critical to the success of DevOps.

Mark Funk
Mark Funk is an experienced information security specialist who works with enterprises to mature and improve their enterprise security programs. Previously, he worked as a security news reporter.