Contact us anytime to know more — Amit A., Founder & COO CISIN
Enterprises today understand the significance of business continuity and profitability for success; consequently, they have taken to shifting away from traditional methods of calculating ROI to better reflect today's fluid marketplace and account for any changes which occur by the time a product actually hits market.
Therefore, profitable outcomes now involve not just calculating ROI but estimating time-to-market estimates as well.
This approach offers several advantages. Not only can it keep up with market changes and help to ensure faster adaptation times, but it can also ensure smoother progression and easier adjustments.
Now we explore how CI/CD accelerates product release automation to accelerate time to market for any given product or service.
Understanding Why CI/CD Is A Primer For Enterprises
Establishing the purpose behind your implementation of CI/CD goes far toward explaining its function. These processes act like force multipliers for any enterprise, and their successful deployment will reap great dividends both financially and time-wise when rolling out new features.
DevOps environments foster collaboration and co-ownership between team members; continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) form the backbones.
While CI allows testing automation to help ensure application updates don't break during implementation changes, CD streamlines and automates every process involved with deployments.
What follows are a series of timely and consistent improvements in development and deployment that serve to shorten product time to market.
Bugs are addressed early, validation takes little time, and processes are orchestrated with ease using modern cloud technologies. Monitoring dashboards provide insight into production environments to reveal performance bottlenecks and performance issues can thus be addressed efficiently.
Reducing processes at various junctures of delivery takes concerted efforts between departments. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) allow companies to develop high-quality software quickly.
Their implementation helps speed delivery times for faster time-to-market with CI/CD.
Read More: Maximizing CI/CD Deployment: What's the Cost of Inefficiency and the Gain of Efficiency?
Release Automation
As more enterprises embrace DevOps practices, speeding product cycles remains one of their core objectives. Release automation offers many advantages, some key ones being improving agility and flexibility across departments while boosting productivity while decreasing manual tasks.
From orchestration and packaging through dependency approval processes and application release automation, solutions must take into account how products interact with systems that they rely on for release.
As COVID-19 takes hold, demand for automation solutions will skyrocket. Today more than ever requires fast returns on investments.
Unfortunately, this cannot happen quickly if focussed on one large process with many complex subprocesses that were never standardized or automated before."
Enterprises will have to adopt more proactive protection mechanisms against future business disruption. According to Forrester research, as we emerge from this current economic crisis, firms will turn more decisively toward automation as an antidote against any further crises threatening human workers by investing more heavily in cognitive capabilities, applied AI, industrial robots, service robots, and robotic process automation (RPA).
Enterprise-wide automation strategies help organizations streamline current processes and execute them during digital transformation, ultimately serving customers better and helping businesses excel in today's digital economy.
Let us examine, in more depth, an enterprise automation checklist in a DevOps world, its practical steps, and best practices for its implementation in detail.
- Adopt Agile: Successful automation starts with adopting agile methodologies and scrum teams, so agile adoption must be prioritized over any other option.
- Evangelize the vision: Make time to share information and conduct demonstrations within the organization to increase awareness about automation while also proving its worth.
- Show small successes: To start out successfully, automating something small is important - do not try and automate everything at once.
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DevOps toolchain: As part of any transition from waterfall to agile processes and practices, always pay careful consideration when changing DevOps toolsets.
Make improvements where appropriate.
- Fail Fast: To identify failures quickly and repair them more affordably, testing should occur as early in the process as feasible; failure costs vary according to which stage it appears in.
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Standardize your practices: Make sure all roles, playbooks, and automation procedures adhere to a standard protocol in order to promote clear code that's easily understandable, stable, and manageable.
This will facilitate efficient production.
- Automate your tools: Develop an easily manageable infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Selecting The Finest Tools Available
Selecting top application release automation tools with features designed to facilitate improved environment provisioning, pipeline management, and test automation framework selection is paramount for effective application release automation strategies.
According to Globe Newswire, estimates of a compound annual growth rate of 20.8% are anticipated for the global application release automation market, which could reach US$5.5 billion within five years.
Software tracking and reporting features should be among the essential capabilities for an ideal automation tool.
Any solution selected must also be flexible enough to adapt to changing business needs, providing for reuse as needed by both new hires as well as future growth within your own organization. Here is a selection of topics that may be useful for your consideration.
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Ansible: Ansible has quickly gained widespread acclaim among businesses due to the benefits it brings, such as increased scalability, agility, control, and compliance, as well as lower infrastructure costs.
Its use has quickly spread beyond IT circles into almost all aspects of life and business.
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Chef: Chef is fast, flexible, and adaptable software designed for rapid deployment on servers with databases, load balancers, and web servers.
Recipes provide configuration instructions on the fly for these solutions.
- Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an extremely flexible system capable of running containers as part of a cluster and monitoring applications across multiple containers, all while being easily utilized across hybrid, multi-cloud, private, and public environments.
- Puppet: Puppet is an open-source, cross-platform solution that enhances productivity and manageability by offering teams real-time alerts and comprehensive reports to detect any problems quickly and address them swiftly.
- Docker: Docker is a lightweight Linux platform based on container technology with powerful features and functionalities to allow users to build secure applications both locally and remotely.
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Jenkins: Jenkins offers an expansive library of plugins designed to ease software project development, deployment, and automation processes.
In particular, its pipeline feature is beloved: from running test cases efficiently through reporting back automatically after testing to automatically committing code into repositories - Jenkins makes software development fast, deployment streamlined, and automation seamless.
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Vagrant: Vagrant helps users manage all tasks within an integrated workflow, from software testing and sharing environments to providing consistent conditions on all machines in an office or home network.
It ensures uniformity among devices.
- TeamCity: Geared towards continuous integration users, TeamCity allows teams to run multiple builds and tests concurrently on various platforms and configurations simultaneously.
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Maven: Maven provides a standardized build system, making onboarding new developers simpler.
Tasks such as dependency closure and automatic update management are made effortless using its project object model (POM).
- Gradle: Gradle is an invaluable asset when developing distributed or complex applications, offering faster building, automation, and delivery by streamlining the building process.
Conclusion
With global change being so rapid, the demand for efficiency and speed has never been higher. CI/CD offers cost savings and faster time to market that make CI/CD an indispensable solution.
Each tool provides specific benefits, but what really sets automation apart is making use of its automation potential to its maximum extent.
As you embark on this transformational journey, keep this in mind with CIS by your side, realizing more with less is not simply an abstract concept - let us work towards building an economy where efficient processes coexist harmoniously with significant results.
