Most businesses struggle to release new software products at the speed they desire. Product managers report that 45% of all product launches get delayed, and 20% of these launches fail to meet their internal targets, according to industry research by Gartner. To keep DevOps teams working with maximum efficiency and speed, businesses today are embracing an approach known as continuous delivery. Continuous delivery shifts developers away from larger, more comprehensive coding projects, in favor of focusing on smaller, more incremental sprints. Significantly, each sprint under a continuous delivery model is expected to produce high-quality, reliable code that is ready to be used at any time.
Because the goal of continuous delivery is to create customer-ready products faster than traditional DevOps processes, continuous delivery relies on automation – specifically, a workflow known as continuous integration. When continuous integration is deployed to support continuous delivery, it means that products go through automated testing prior to their deployment to production. Consequently, building a continuous delivery pipeline requires a sustained investment of resources and time. Although this investment initially will lower the DevOps team’s short-term productivity, it will pay off over time; this is the phenomenon known as the j-curve. Let’s explore four key strategies for designing a continuous delivery pipeline that will meet an organization’s most ambitious DevOps goals:
- Recognize the limits of DevOps automation: Continuous integration is valuable precisely because so much of it is automated. Through automation, code can be rapidly sent through rigorous testing, ensuring only reliable, high-quality code is delivered. But automation has its limits. Automation tends to be much more brittle than traditional software development. For example, automation doesn’t handle change very well, as continuous integration tools tend to be purpose-built using crowd-sourced components that DevOps teams must maintain. Thus, DevOps teams need to avoid treating automation as a set-it-and-forget-it resource. As code is being run through continuous integration tools, DevOps teams should be maintaining visibility and responding to errors, failures, and other notifications as they arise. Meanwhile, when the automation tools need updating, DevOps teams need to take responsibility for identifying and implementing the updates in a timely fashion.
- Empower DevOps teams to act decisively when problems arise: Continuous delivery pipelines can and should be moving as fast as possible. To maintain this velocity, it’s critical that problems are addressed as soon as they arise. Unfortunately, continuous delivery pipelines in many organizations are not set up to prioritize rapid problem-solving. The most common underlying issue is that there’s a disconnect between what the DevOps team prioritizes and what the team ideally should be prioritizing. Too often, the work of DevOps is “gamified” with superfluous, tangential performance metrics that DevOps teams are told to focus on – at the expense of solving the most pressing problems. Thus, DevOps teams need to be empowered to act decisively in these situations, even if these scenarios don’t fit neatly into their performance metrics. As soon DevOps teams spot an issue that could snowball, they should recognize that they understand the issue better than anyone else and that they are uniquely qualified and positioned to fix it.
- Use static code analysis to detect potential vulnerabilities faster: In a traditional DevOps environment, developers identify vulnerabilities and defects in their code when they run a program using this code. The problem is that not every potential issue with the code is discoverable during testing. That’s why it’s also important to turn to a method known as static code analysis to detect potential vulnerabilities. Static code analysis uses automation to extensively analyze code against one or more sets of rules – without actually using the code to run any programs. The end result is that DevOps teams can complete vulnerability analyses on new code at lightning speed, which, in turn, ensures that an organization’s continuous delivery pipeline moves at maximum speed.
- Integrate security monitoring into the earliest stages of the DevOps lifecycle: In the DevOps world, security can never be an afterthought. At the earliest stages of the DevOps lifecycle, security checks need to be integrated. Meanwhile, as with the automation that is possible elsewhere in continuous delivery pipelines, security monitoring can and should be automated.
Continuous delivery should be front and center in every DevOps team’s approach to developing high-quality, reliable code. To build a sustainable continuous delivery pipeline, businesses should make sure that they recognize the limits of DevOps automation, empower DevOps teams to act decisively when they spot problems, rely on static code analysis to detect vulnerabilities faster and integrate security monitoring into the earliest stages of the DevOps lifecycle.
Ippon has extensive experience partnering with DevOps teams to build and streamline continuous delivery pipelines. To learn more about how to get a continuous delivery model to fire on all cylinders in your organization, please check out Ippon’s latest eBook, “The Secret to Boosting DevSecOps and Developer Productivity.”