DevOps
Deliver customer value faster with DevOps from Cloudsoft.
DevOps is a combination of culture, processes and tools that allows an organisation to deliver applications and services at high velocity and quality.
A framework for thinking about DevOps was introduced by Damon Edwards and John Willis, and later extended by Jez Humble to give “CALMS”:
How Cloudsoft helps
Cultural and Process Change
Cloudsoft help organisation to embrace DevOps, helping to change the culture and processes. Our experienced consultants will:
- Review an organisation’s existing culture and processes, and through a series of workshops help guide the organisation to adopt DevOps.
- Work with the organization’s teams to adopt best-practices and to break down silos; encourage sharing and collaboration between developers and operations.
- Identify and help fix bottlenecks in the flow of idea-to-delivery, and encourage a culture of continuous improvement.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Pipelines
CI/CD pipelines are essential for efficient product delivery. It allows a faster release frequency, along with increased confidence and quality.
Cloudsoft set up pipelines to automate end-to-end software delivery processes: automated build, test and deploy.
Infrastructure Automation
Configuration-as-code is another essential part of building reliable systems. Automation of the infrastructure’s initial setup, and of its subsequent change, reduces operational risk and allows improvements to be made faster.
Infrastructure changes can be:
- code-reviewed
- tested in staging
- applied automatically
These steps greatly reduce the risk of human error. Cloudsoft are experts in tools like AWS CloudFormation and in configuration management.
Monitoring and Measurement
Monitoring the health and performance of a system allows an organisation to move fast without sacrificing quality. Observability of the system is also vital for efficiently troubleshooting issues. Techniques include metric collection, automated alarms and remediation, aggregated logging, and distributed tracing.
It is also very useful to measure the impact of new features, and how those features are subsequently used. This allows stakeholders to be data-driven when making decisions.
Containers
Containers allow software to be packaged in a way that isolates the software from the runtime environment. This gives greater consistency across the development process: from developers’ own laptops, through to test and production. Containers also allow software components to be spun up faster and to run more efficiently.
However, containers introduce a new set of operational challenges for organisations who are used to managing virtual machines.
Cloudsoft brings a wealth of experience in Docker, and in runtime platforms including Kubernetes, ECS and Fargate.
Microservices architectures split an application into a set of loosely coupled services. When done well, this can bring many benefits: services can be developed, tested, upgraded and scaled independently.
However, implementing and managing a microservices architecture introduces many new challenges, and increases the scale of some existing challenges. Handling this complexity requires experience in a wide range of DevOps skills.
Start your own DevOps journey or improve your current processes with Cloudsoft: