BUYER’S GUIDE TO CI/CD | PART 3 OF 3
L
ogic dictates that going faster has its dangers – there is a
temptation to cut corners, and there is a risk of increasing
errors. But with software development, that’s not always
the case.
“It might be counter-intuitive, but quality can come from speed,”
says Vladyslav Gram, head of DevOps at Ciklum, a bespoke software development and IT outsourcing company. “The faster we
develop and deploy, the higher the quality, because we can deploy
with relatively smaller portions of code, which are easier to test.
Meanwhile, developers get immediate feedback from the production environment.”
Quick turnaround
Continuous integration and delivery promises a remarkable
acceleration in software development, but adaptors first need to
get some basics in place to reap the rewards, writes Lindsay Clark
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Deliver at speed with CI/CD
Gram started working with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in 2016. An element of the DevOps
philosophy, CI/CD is focused on getting code into production
as quickly as possible, in contrast with earlier approaches to
developing software, including waterfall, which produce larger
chunks of code over longer periods, making testing more time
consuming and less reliable, he says.
“If we have a huge regression plan for testers, if we have one
million features dependent on each other, it’s hard to predict
which components it will depend on. But if we are deploying only
a single small feature, we can test it and can easily predict what
the dependencies are,” says Gram.
The benefits have been stark, he says. Ciklum has been working
with European retailer Metro to build an e-commerce platform
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and has cut the standard three-month deployment release schedule to one hour to get changes to production.
“The difference is huge, but that doesn’t mean we are deploying
the same amount of changes every hour that we would release in
three months. However, it does mean the developer gets feedback
from users and the production environment much faster than on
a three-month release schedule,” he says.
to poor performers, the former achieved 208 times more frequent code deployments, 106 times faster lead time from committing code to deployment and 2,604 times faster to recover
from incidents.
Race to cloud
Although they are related, DevOps and CI/CD should not be
confused, says Ariane Gadd,
Features delivered faster
lead DevOps engineer at KPMG.
Jez Humble, a lecturer at University
“DevOps is more of a culture, a
is
the
ability
to
of California, Berkeley, and
mindset, and a way of working.
co-founder of DevOps Research
CI/CD is an approach to orchesget changes of all types
and Assessment (Dora), literally
tration led by tooling and automanew features configuration
wrote the book on CI/CD in 2010.
tion. Organisations use CI/CD to
He defines it as: “…the ability to get
implement technology projects in
changes bug fixes experiments
changes of all types – including new
a DevOps kind of way. You can’t do
features, configuration changes,
DevOps without CI/CD.”
into production or into the
bug fixes and experiments – into
The rise of CI/CD coincides with
production, or into the hands of
the increasing popularity of deployhands of users safely and
users, safely and quickly in a susment in the cloud. Although organiquickly in a sustainable way
tainable way.”
sations could use conventional
According to a survey by software
development techniques to build
Jez Humble, Dora
testing firm Mabl, 53% of the 500
software for the cloud, there would
respondents use continuous intebe little point, says Gadd.
gration and 25% plan to introduce it. Meanwhile, 38% of respond“You’re not really getting the benefits of the cloud if you are
ents employ continuous delivery and 30% plan to do so.
deploying software as you would on-premise. [With CI/CD] you
The 2019 Accelerate state of devops report, for which Dora surget cloud-native things like optimisation, scalability and elasticveyed 3,000 developers, found that, comparing the elite group
ity, and performance. If you don’t leverage those, you’ve just got
“[CI/CD ]
–
,
–
,
,
,
,
”
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an on-premise solution in the cloud and you are not really leveraging the benefits,” she says.
Culture must turn a corner
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One of the difficulties in introducing CI/CD is changing people’s
roles as new tools are deployed. Security controls and change
approvals were once manual processes, with a person allocated
to them. With CI/CD they are automated.
“It is not necessarily telling people we are going to automate you
out of a job, but it is saying, ‘Let’s change the way we work’. The
trickiest thing is getting all the teams working together so they
understand they will not see the process as they have done in the
past and they are not going to go through the change board every
time they want to implement a change. It is still secure and in line
with policy, but it is a question of getting everyone on board, and
educating them in the new way of doing things,” says Gadd.
Editor’s comment
Start slow, build from there
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delays are putting
the brakes on Windows
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Professionals serves
tech from all angles
Buyer’s guide to CI/CD
What EU’s decision
on Facebook means
for social media
Is artificial intelligence
failing to live up to the
hype for enterprises?
Downtime
The introduction of CI/CD has not been flawless. For example, half of organisations doing so do not include any security
testing elements, according to a 451 Research survey of 350
enterprise IT decision-makers in North America and Europe
fielded in May 2018.
Problems can occur when development teams confuse the
speed of delivery with a lack of preparation, says Gadd. “The
mistake a lot of people make is they think it is all about building
quickly and delivering fast, but they forget to document properly,
so nobody knows what they have actually done,” she says.
Top three pitfalls to avoid
when introducing CI/CD
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)
can enable faster iterations, faster time to value for customers, services isolation for debugging, and root-cause analysis,
says Shiven Ramji, chief product officer of Auth0, developer
of an enterprise identity platform.
But he also offers lessons in avoiding pitfalls. His top three
recommendations are:
n S
eparation of services. It is critical that you break apart
your monolithic app into separate services such that they
are isolated and abstracted from each other.
n B
efore you get to CD, make sure you do CI well. There are
some foundational elements such as having consistent
tooling, libraries and operating system configurations.
n M
any organisations have tooling sprawl in an effort to
get CI/CD right. Make sure you invest in the underlying infrastructure, the correct tooling and have the right
metrics in place.
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Home
News
Post Office will pay
£57.75m damages
to settle dispute with
subpostmasters
How Intel processor
delays are putting
the brakes on Windows
10 migrations
Association of Tennis
Professionals serves
tech from all angles
Technology is lifeblood
for emergency
response by London
Ambulance Service
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to CI/CD
What EU’s decision
on Facebook means
for social media
Is artificial intelligence
failing to live up to the
hype for enterprises?
Downtime
Gadd recommends investing time upfront in optimising infrastructure and developing the correct scripting. Otherwise teams
will have to go back and make changes retrospectively, losing
benefits and damaging the reputation of the approach they are
trying to promote.
“It takes time at the beginning to automate things and write
scripts. But once you’ve got that right, you can repeat it as many
times as you want,” she says.
and move up to the next level,” he says. “Teams that go too fast
before they are ready just break things faster, and they don’t get
fixed. It’s definitely about going as fast as you can, but no faster.
That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned.”
The right tools
As teams’ understanding of CI/CD improves, so does the tooling. This ranges from generalist
collaboration software such as
eams that go too fast
Curb your speed
Slack, to technical tools such as
Cytora has developed a technology
Pivotal Concourse, which helps
before
they
are
ready
just
break
platform to help insurance comdeveloper teams design workflow
panies underwrite their policies
for modular components.
things faster and they don t
more accurately. Don Tran, director
For all its increase in popularity,
of engineering, began introducing
CI/CD has a long way to go before
get fixed t s definitely about
CI/CD about a year ago.
it becomes the de facto method of
going
as
fast
as
you
can
but
He says the greatest lesson is that
software development, says Tran.
it is not all about speed. “When I
“Software developers are convergno faster hat s the biggest
started, I thought it was about going
ing to using a lot of the things that
super-fast, just unlocking the speed.
come out of continuous delivery. But
lesson ve learned
But it is actually way more imporenterprise IT is all-encompassing
D
on Tran, Cytora
tant to go as fast as you can right
and pretty big, and this concept is
now, but no faster,” he says.
still very new. It’s early days.”
Different development teams will rely on different infrastrucCI/CD promises a phenomenal acceleration of software develture, tooling and be at a different stage in their DevOps journey.
opment speed compared with traditional methods of building
If a team gets the cycle down from two weeks to one week, they
software. But teams considering the approach must educate
should see that as progress, says Tran. “If that’s as fast as you can
developers, change the culture among the wider IT teams, and
go right there and then, then good, but you can iterate on that
invest in tooling and infrastructure to reap the benefits. n
“T
.I ’
.T
I’
,
’
,
’
”
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