Devops Implementation – DevopsCurry

What is Mobile DevOps & How is it Different?

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:33:07 +0000

: Image credits: What is the Role of DevOps in Mobile App Development

DevOps generally refers to a collaborative environment among the development and operations teams. It aims to ensure a smooth flow of communication between various teams to make the software development and deployment process as effortless as possible. It involves several tools for automation, containerization, orchestration, etc. However, it’s not the same for every business or company. For example, DevOps for an enterprise looks very different from DevOps for a smaller startup. In the same way, DevOps for mobile app companies i.e. mobile DevOps, also has a unique set of problems and solutions.

In this article, you will learn about how mobile DevOps is different from general DevOps, its key concepts, and best practices.

How Mobile DevOps is Different?

The usual DevOps principles apply to all software types and business environments. However, they may differ in terms of scale, tool sets, and some processes. That said, mobile DevOps is specifically designed for mobile app development and solves challenges unique to mobile applications.

To start with, mobile apps need to be approved by app stores like Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Moreover, once the app is published, every following update also needs to be approved by the app store. This means, fixing any bugs and making the corrected version available for the end user can take time. Also, deploying the app to app stores requires additional formalities like meeting the right asset requirements and signing certificates. Hence, regular CI/CD practices may not be possible to apply in the case of mobile apps.

Next, mobile apps require extensive testing to make sure they work on all devices with different screen sizes and operating systems (OSs) seamlessly. This can be difficult to maintain as new device models come up every now and then. Moreover, mobile app developers also need to ensure that the app works with any update in the device’s OS.

Security and data privacy is yet another important aspect of mobile apps as mobile devices often contain sensitive data such as personal information or money transactions.

Mobile DevOps Key Concepts

Mobile DevOps follows the key concepts of usual DevOpssuch as…

Continuous Integration (CI): In Mobile DevOps, Continuous Integration involves developers frequently merging their code changes into a shared repository, triggering automated builds and tests.
Continuous Testing: Continuous Testing involves using automation tools to ensure that every code change in a mobile app works smoothly and properly.
Continuous Monitoring: After a mobile app is deployed, Continuous Monitoring tracks its performance, crashes, and user interactions in real-time allowing teams to detect and resolve issues quickly to enhance app stability and user satisfaction.
Continuous Delivery (CD): Continuous Delivery is all about automating the process of building, testing, and getting the mobile app ready for release. This means that new features and fixes are always good to go for deployment to staging or app stores without needing someone to do it manually.
Continuous Deployment: Continuous Deployment takes Continuous Delivery a step further by automatically deploying every code change that passes testing directly to production, allowing for faster mobile app updates, though it still depends on app store review processes for final releases.

Mobile DevOps Best Practices

Automate everything: Automation is one of the key principles of DevOps. It helps save time, cost, and much of manual effort. Moreover, it also minimizes any chance of human error. Automating testing and deployment helps to reduce the time-to-market for apps while maintaining quality and integrity.
Monitoring and feedback: App stores have a public rating feature which is often a mix of negative comments, genuine issues, and praise. That said, developers can use that feedback to improve their app or fix bugs. Monitoring tools should also be used to monitor the app’s performance in real-time to diagnose and resolve issues faster.
Security: The codes and dependencies of the mobile app must be regularly checked for vulnerabilities and loopholes to ensure data privacy and the safety of users. DevSecOps is a term used to refer to a DevOps pipeline where security is prioritized.
Version control: Version control tools like Git help to manage multiple versions of the mobile app and enable team members to collaborate on them.
UI/UX design: Mobile apps should have a responsive design and a user-friendly user interface so that they work smoothly on all device models and screen sizes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Mobile DevOps brings a tailored approach to app development, addressing unique challenges like app store approvals, extensive device testing, and security. By incorporating key practices such as automation, continuous integration, and monitoring, Mobile DevOps ensures faster, more reliable releases while maintaining high app quality and user satisfaction. As the mobile ecosystem continues to evolve, adopting Mobile DevOps is essential for developers to stay competitive and deliver seamless app experiences to users.

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Blue-green Deployment Explained: The Secret to ZERO Downtime

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 03:52:14 +0000

This article talks about what is blue-green deployment and how it helps to reduce downtime to improve end-user experience.

Introduction to Blue-green Deployment

Frequent and quality deployments are a core principle of DevOps. However, whenever you need to deploy a new version, you must stop the current one first. This leads to significant downtime for the end user and can affect customer experience. Moreover, if any bug or error is found after release, it will require additional downtime to withdraw the updated version and switch back to the old one. This process is how newer versions of the application were deployed conventionally.

A modern approach that solves the problem of downtime and time-consuming rollback procedures is blue-green deployment. Although a bit complicated, blue-green deployment requires ‘zero’ downtime and makes rollbacks easier, thus ensuring seamless user experiences.

But how does it work?

How does Blue-green Deployment Work

Blue-green deployment involves 2 production environments:

‘Blue’ environment is the old/active environment.
‘Green’ environment is the newest environment that needs to be deployed.

As per the traditional method, the blue environment should be stopped first and the green environment should be deployed in its place. However, in blue-green deployment, the green environment is deployed alongside the blue one so that both of them run simultaneously. Then, the user traffic is gradually shifted from the blue environment to the green one. Once all of the traffic has been successfully shifted to the green environment, the blue environment is finally withdrawn. Therefore, there occurs no downtime for any user as both the old and the new versions stay active.

The following illustration depicts how traffic is shifted from the blue environment to the green environment…

Image credits: What is Blue/Green Deployment?

But I also mentioned that it makes rolling back easier in case of bugs, right? How does that work?

So, when the traffic is being shifted from the blue environment to the green one, the latter is closely monitored for any signs of errors or bugs. If any of them occurs, whatever traffic that lies in the green environment is shifted back to the blue environment. The green one is then rolled back for redevelopment and retesting. In this way, blue-green deployment makes rolling back easier in case of bugs that might have bypassed the testing phase but are evident only when actual users interact with it.

All the steps involved in blue-green deployment can be summarized as follows…

Image credits: Blue-green deployment

Benefits

The following are the main advantages of blue-green deployment:

Rapid releases: Earlier, development teams had to wait for off-peak times like midnight to deploy new features so that the downtime affects minimum user traffic. But with blue-green deployment, new versions can released spontaneously without any risk of downtime. That said, it helps to achieve continuous delivery (CD).
Easier rollbacks: As discussed before, blue-green deployment makes rolling back updates simpler without requiring any additional downtime. It makes the deployment process even more risk-free.
A/B testing: A major advantage of blue-green deployment is that it allows for A/B testing. For this, a new code is loaded into the blue environment instead of the green one. A part of the traffic (usually 50%) is sent to the green environment while the other half remains in the ‘newer’ blue environment. Then both of these environments are monitored to decide which one works best and appeals to the audience more.
Improved customer experience: Overall, blue-green deployment helps to improve user experience by limiting downtime and providing 24/7 availability.

Challenges & Limitations

Although blue-green deployment sounds ideal, it comes with a few challenges and limitations:

Demanding: Using the blue-green deployment approach can be expensive as it requires you to keep two nearly identical environments active simultaneously. Also, it requires smooth and effortless coordination between the teams and its members.
Set up time: Initially, setting up blue-green deployment can be a time-intensive process and may require many tries before it is perfected.
Complex traffic routing: Moving traffic from one environment to the other (traffic routing) smoothly can be a complex task and may sometimes cause latency issues. Tools like load balancers may have to be used.
Not applicable to all applications: Blue-green deployment is difficult to apply in the case of stateful applications. This is because if a user is active in the blue environment, his/her user session may get interrupted or lost after making the switch to the green environment.

Conclusion

Blue-green deployment is a modern solution that effectively addresses the downtime problem, ensuring a smoother and more reliable user experience. By running two environments in parallel and switching traffic seamlessly between them, it eliminates the need for downtime during updates. It comes with an added advantage of easier rollbacks which makes it suitable for teams looking to improve their deployment efficiency. While it does have its limitations, such as infrastructure costs and setup complexity, the overall benefits make it a powerful strategy for delivering continuous and uninterrupted services.

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Enterprise DevOps: Why is it Important for Large Businesses

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 04:23:54 +0000

We have already talked about DevOps and DevOps toolchain. In this article we will be discussing DevOps for enterprises or Enterprise DevOps, why is it important, and best practices.

Introduction to Enterprise DevOps

Traditionally, the IT development team and the IT operations team worked in ‘siloed’ i.e. isolated environments. The former focused on developing newer codes as quickly as possible, while the latter tried to deploy these codes without losing the stability of the application. Both of the teams focused entirely on their goal, thus lacking communication. However, this led to slower releases which ultimately affected the business as a whole.

Hence, DevOps was introduced as an approach to bring the two teams close enough for them to collaborate towards a common goal. It can be defined as “…the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity…” (AWS)

Image credits: Enterprise Devops

In smaller businesses, DevOps principles are easier to incorporate as the number of people is less with their scope of work often overlapping with each other. In larger businesses, however, a specialized team is set up to handle specific aspects of the software development process. DevOps becomes much more complicated to execute in this case, thus giving rise to a special term called ‘Enterprise DevOps’ which refers to the implementation of DevOps practices and principles in large-scale organizations or enterprises.

Why is Enterprise DevOps Important

Some of the challenges typical to larger businesses or enterprises that make Enterprise DevOps crucial are as follows:

Large businesses need to release updates frequently to maintain their competitive edge in the market without compromising existing services. This is known as continuous development (CD).
These businesses involve several processes or tasks that may be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Enterprise DevOps helps to automate these tasks, thus saving time, effort, and labor costs.
Bigger companies often involve several teams handling their own set of tasks and responsibilities. So that it doesn’t lead to isolated or ‘siloed’ work environments, enterprise DevOps ensures smooth communication and collaboration between them.
Enterprise DevOps allows for both horizontal and vertical scaling ensuring established companies are ready for unexpected traffic spikes.
Enterprise DevOps helps to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster, thus minimizing downtime and ensuring rapid recovery.

Enterprise DevOps Best Practices

Following are some of the best practices for implementing DevOps in an enterprise ennvironment…

Test automation

In traditional software development processes, the application was tested manually once it was completely developed. If any issue was found during this testing (as was the case often), the app had to be sent for resolving and redeveloping again. This led to slower releases and increased time to market.

Test automation refers to automated testing using various tools like Selenium. It allows for continuous testing alongside continuous development. Test automation helps to reduce failure risk and prevent bottlenecks.

Continuous monitoring

While test automation helps to detect anomalies in the application during development, continuous monitoring helps to detect them after deployment. It involves using tools that monitor various application metrics like CPU utilization, network throughput, latency, traffic, etc. Monitoring helps developers detect bugs in real time, thus allowing them time to fix those bugs quickly.

Another term related to monitoring is observability. While monitoring involves continuous collection of data, observability also takes into account the historical data. Hence, observability provides much deeper insights than monitoring. However, although observability has a wider scope, it cannot function without monitoring.

DevSecOps

Security is paramount in an enterprise environment as it involves faster release cycles and multiple stakeholders. Hence, instead of leaving security as an afterthought in the software development process, it should be integrated into every step. This is known as DevSecOps, a DevOps approach that prioritizes security. ‘Shifting security to the left’ is also often used to refer to the early on addressing of security issues during the development process, alongside code writing and testing. DevSecOps can be implemented through automating security testing and continuous monitoring.

Containerization & Microservices

Large enterprises require scalable and flexible infrastructure to deal with sudden spikes in traffic. Microservices architecture is an approach that involves distributing the application into several independent services, each handling a specific business function. It allows the scaling up of individual services with no need to scale the application as a whole. Other complementing technologies include containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes, and serverless computing.

Standardize toolsets

The market is supplied with multiple tools and technologies for performing the same tasks and procedures. If every individual or team uses a different set of tools, this can createoften create silos and lead to inconsistencies. Hence, standardizing toolsets across teams helps to unify the processes, improve communication and compatibility, and reduce the risk of errors. Moreover, it can help in saving costs and ensuring standardized security tests for all codes.

Conclusion

In the modern world, DevOps is crucial to a business’s success. However, implementing DevOps in larger organizations or enterprises can be difficult due to its huge size and diversity. Enterprise DevOps is a set of DevOps principles and practices specifically designed for these large enterprises. It involves automating all manual tasks to optimize workflows for speed and efficiency. However, it is not just about adopting the latest tools and technologies. It is about creating a culture of transparency, collaboration, and teamwork to work towards a shared goal of business success.

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Nine Best Practices for a Successful Devops Implementation in 2023

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 14:12:10 +0000

Successful DevOps Implementation: Nine Best Practices in 2023

The benefits of Devops implementation are clear; organizations that embrace the shift to DevOps release more capabilities, faster releases and experience fewer performance issues.

However despite the obvious advantages, a DevOps transformation isn’t an endeavour to be taken lightly. As Ian Head, research director at Gartner, predicted, “90% of I&O organizations attempting to use DevOps without specifically addressing their cultural foundations will fail.”

So, if your organization has decided to take the plunge and implement DevOps based transformation project. This is an article that will try and help you guide your thoughts on the best practices, as you move ahead on the Devops implementation project.

1. Do not jump the Bandwagon

DevOps is not a magic solution or a magic wand for all the problems that the company is facing. It is a long-term solution for the transformation.
Large programs and larger transformation projects are time-consuming and they take a considerable amount of resources – both time and money. It is important that the organization understands the requirement of a transformation program and lays down the foundational rules for the same.
Automating everything in one shot is always not the priority.
Securing the acceptance of the key organizational POCs forms a crucial part of the program. While internal acceptance is critical, it is also imperative that a dip-stick survey and understanding from the external stakeholders is also needed.

2. No more DevOps engineers as a Role

DevOps was initially introduced and promoted as a software development methodology which will aid agile development process. However, as the days passed the approach transformed itself into a role.
The DevOps Engineer today only manages the infrastructure. For many organizations, implementing DevOps means, scaling up the team of DevOps engineers. This does not help.
If DevOps is maintained as a transformational approach rather than a fancy role or profile, then the enterprises could see a huge success in the implementation of the program.

3. Build a Collaborative Culture

A DevOps team structure requires a change in the way everyone interacts within the organization. Proper communication is essential for a successful DevOps implementation.
With so many departments and teams collaborating and working together to meet a specific goal, good communication is the key to avoid errors and reducing your chances of failures.
Hence one should try to adopt or build a collaborative culture and open communication within teams to ensure the success of the Devops transformation process.

4. Conduct Benchmarking

Before engaging professionals for a transformation program based on the DevOps methodology, any organization must conduct a benchmarking exercise. It helps if these exercises studies multiple things such as number of processes automated, the number of engineers required, the amount of infrastructure needed to scaleup, and much more.
This exercise will not only justify the spending of time and money by the organization, but it will also help arrive at a starting point for the project.

5. Define the Performance metric

Like a science experiment is not fruitful, if it does not have an objective the transformation program will also be not fruitful if there are no performance metrics defined at the beginning.
The relevant project teams involved could work with the relevant stakeholders to arrive at the parameters and then work backward to achieve them through the DevOps based transformation software development methodology.

6. Continuous Monitoring and Feedback loop

This not only helps avoid any crisis but also helps maintain healthy progress in the development process.
Before the DevOps era, many research prove that developers generally did not monitor their application performance in production and assumed that any failure is related to infrastructure on which it is run.So, it is crucial for development teams and operation teams to check and monitor the performance of the application.
Also post monitoring the feedback that you get from internal teams or your customers, also plays a crucial role in DevOps implementation process and is a deciding factor for the success of DevOps transformation.

7. Dashboard automation

An automated dashboard not only helps the engineers keep a track of the SDLC process, but also helps maintain an active database of changes made to the server and database over a period.
This dashboard will give you data with in-depth understanding and provide reports of every operation during the DevOps transformation process.
It also helps to monitor the entire DevOps implementation process along with how effectively the DevOps teams are working together, integration of cloud automation toolchain and an overall platform health status.

8. Getting the right DevOps toolchain

It is important to leverage all the DevOps based tools such as Kubernetes, Docker technology, Jenkins, Git and others. These tools not only give the project manager a sense of control over the project but also help automate mundane tasks.
It is advised that the database technology that is used in a large DevOps project helps the company scale-out and not scaleup.
As per Devops experts, all the toolsets that you choose should be compatible with your system, which is a good configuration management practice.
A good selection of tools helps minimize any conflicts that can occur between development teams and operations.

9. Modularization of Architecture

There are a lot of legacy applications that will change as a part of this transformation project involving DevOps.
So modularization of legacy applications will not only help modernize the environment, but it will also reduce a lot of costly overheads.
Hence moving from a legacy monolithic architecture to a modular Microservices approach will help in the long run and also ensure a successful Devops implementation

While this is an indicative list of the possible best practices to be kept in mind while a Devops transformation project, the actual list of best practices is arrived at based on the current setup of the organisation, level of automation and tools used, collaboration and inter-communication within teams and also volume of the project.

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