Architecting Your DevOps Pipeline for Automation at Scale

Enterprise application development services are growing faster than organizations can deliver them. For development teams, it means a growing necessity to become a high performing dev team that achieves ultra-fast operational performance and software delivery ahead of their competitors. 

A recent Accelerate: State of DevOps report explores the key metrics that identify the top and low performing DevOps teams, including the deployment frequency, lead time for changes (velocity), change failure rate, restore time, and reliability. 

For organizations, moving your team from a low to a high DevOps performing team calls for the need to focus and improve on DevOps automation. The holy grail of a successful DevOps strategy. For IT leaders, it means a pressing need to move and push your team towards a scalable and automated DevOps pipeline. 

We’ll take you through architecting your DevOps pipeline for automation at scale. 

What is a DevOps Pipeline?

A DevOps pipeline refers to automated processes that allow rapid, reliable, and iterative software delivery. A DevOps delivery pipeline aims at speeding up the time it takes to go from code changes to deployed software. 

Essential components in a DevOps pipeline include: 

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Integrates and merges new code changes in a central repository. 

Continuous Testing: Performs automated tests on code integrations achieved during the CI phase to ensure high-quality development before delivery.

Continuous Deployment: Follows continuous delivery to get automatically tested components released into production. 

Continuous Monitoring: Validates and verifies an application’s performance and stability.  

Continuous Feedback: Continuous responses from different stakeholders to ensure that applications work as expected for all user views. 

Continuous Operations: Ensures minimal user interruptions or downtime due to any hardware or software changes.

Why Should You Automate Your DevOps Pipeline?

While it’s possible to run a DevOps pipeline architecture manually, automation at scale is where the real value lies.

Manually designed DevOps pipelines are time-consuming and error prone compared to automated ones. Automated DevOps pipelines streamline the time and effort required to manage, track, and maintain various stages of your software development process. This includes the benefit of reducing the associated risks. 

Furthermore, architecting your DevOps pipeline for automation guarantees that everything is done accurately and consistently, regardless of who’s doing it. It leads inevitably to the following outcomes for your team:

Increased Innovation 

With DevOps pipeline automation, teams have more time to think outside the box and attempt new ideas, leading to greater creativity overall. Also, teams can confidently ship new features to the end users and quickly undo changes if they don’t work out or if customer feedback is negative. 

Quality and Automation-First Culture

Fundamental to an efficient DevOps delivery pipeline is how teams run automated tests in CI/CD pipelines, including functional and non-functional testing and quality checks. By standardizing and automating your DevOps pipeline, you can ensure that your DevOps teams prioritize quality first and the development of test automation that encompasses all new projects. They also get more time to improve design, architecture, and execution. 

Continuous Visibility and Observability

App development is dynamic due to the involvement of disparate teams. So, it can be challenging to gain an overview of the activities occurring within a DevOps pipeline. By automating DevOps pipelines, your team will have greater visibility of what’s going on in the pipeline’s architecture, allowing them to identify issues in the code and fix them more easily. Additionally, your DevOps pipeline will be observable, allowing your teams to monitor metrics swiftly, recognize problems, and implement fixes. In the long run, an entirely visible and perceptible pipeline increases trust in your code and makes bug fixes easier to implement.

Faster Feature Delivery and Consistency 

With an automated DevOps pipeline, DevOps teams can devote more time and energy to enhancing existing features and addressing bugs. What’s more, DevOps pipeline automation is crucial to maintaining uniformity across all your software development environments. For instance, in an Azure DevOps pipeline architecture, you have multiple ways to build your pipeline for automation at scale. Either it can be done through standard continuous integration or by integrating custom triggers like commit messages into projects via GitHub webhooks. 

Again, you don’t want your Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline architecture staging environment to be running an older version of the software while your production environment is running a newer version of the software, as that could lead to significant bugs or data loss. 

Enhanced Team Morale 

With more possibilities for automated tools, innovation, and fewer roadblocks to creativity, you get a high-morale engineer workforce that is better able to focus on tasks, while building reliable software products faster. 

Improved Business Value 

By automating DevOps pipelines, teams may adjust to accommodate shifting market conditions and evolving customer preferences. Using monitoring tools to find and fix bugs saves time and helps dev teams keep track of problems so they can see patterns and make changes more quickly. Further, they can understand end-user feedback, a crucial element for tailoring software products to satisfy ever-evolving market needs.

Tips for Building a Successful CI/CD Pipeline 

The centerpiece of a successful DevOps pipeline is a CI/CD pipeline architecture with an agile DevOps workflow focused on an iterative, collaborative, and reliable software delivery process. 

Below, we outline tips to help you implement successful CI/CD deployment in DevOps.

Focus on your CI/CD pipeline goals:

Review the current state of your organization’s CI/CD pipeline. Ask yourself, what specific CI/CD goals are you looking to achieve? Automating the testing process? If so, what pieces of testing? Unit tests? Full system integration tests? How will you measure success? 

Likewise, is your org truly ready for fully automated, continuous deployment on every commit? Does your approach to risk tolerate this? From there, you can easily foresee how to incorporate the CI/CD pipeline into a new project without disrupting the established workflow.

Understand the CI/CD ropes first:

Understand the process you’re trying to execute. For example, look into the tools and technologies needed to accomplish your objectives, and how they’ll be installed and work together. Some tools are well positioned for deploying into classical infrastructure environments, such as virtual machines. Others, such as ArgoCD, are optimized for workloads that run in Kubernetes.

Below, we outline tips to help you implement successful CI/CD deployment in DevOps.

Focus on your CI/CD pipeline goals:

Review the current state of your organization’s CI/CD pipeline. Ask yourself, what specific CI/CD goals are you looking to achieve? Automating the testing process? If so, what pieces of testing? Unit tests? Full system integration tests? How will you measure success? 

Likewise, is your org truly ready for fully automated, continuous deployment on every commit? Does your approach to risk tolerate this? From there, you can easily foresee how to incorporate the CI/CD pipeline into a new project without disrupting the established workflow.

Understand the CI/CD ropes first:

Understand the process you’re trying to execute. For example, look into the tools and technologies needed to accomplish your objectives, and how they’ll be installed and work together. Some tools are well positioned for deploying into classical infrastructure environments, such as virtual machines. Others, such as ArgoCD, are optimized for workloads that run in Kubernetes.

Evaluate your team’s needs:

Building a successful CI/CD pipeline requires understanding each team member’s specific skill set and needs. Having this knowledge makes the DevOps pipeline automation more intuitively clear. CI/CD should develop gradually to meet the needs of your teams so that you can effortlessly and efficiently realize your pipeline objectives.

Anchor your CI/CD pipeline on people and speed:

Your entire CI/CD pipeline architecture, from test, dev, ops, and security to integration should be a smooth process without failing builds. It should be easily understood by your engineers, enabling them to work and fix issues faster. If your builds are constantly broken or throwing false alerts, it drowns or slows down engineers who quickly learn to ignore them, weakening the pipeline.

Prioritize security:

Despite the many benefits, CI/CD processes present new security vulnerabilities due to their fast pace and minimal human monitoring. You can control such threats and know what you’re up against when you observe security best practices and run automated tests in CI/CD pipelines. DevSecOps helps play a crucial role in adding security through automated images and container scanning for bugs and vulnerabilities.  

By leveraging well-tuned CI/CD scale-up pipelines, DevOps teams benefit through faster application deployment, shorter feedback loops, and multiple daily releases. 

Why Should You Automate Your Pipelines with Cloudify?

DevOps pipelines are constantly evolving based on what works best for each organization. Hence, it’s vital to architect your pipeline for automation to scale your business needs while confidently building and deploying reliable applications that meet user demands.

The Cloudify platform provides infrastructure automation using Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud environment while enabling developers to self-service their environments.

With Cloudify, you can:

Realize operation agility, flexibility, and speed

Your team quickly adapts to resource demands, builds, experiments, and makes changes, drastically reducing deployment time (up to 98%) and achieving more velocity (up to 60%). 

Build automation structures and controls 

Upgrade operations according to your certified architecture by eliminating as many manual, error-prone processes as possible while enforcing holistic governance and compliance regulations. 

Achieve 300% faster time to market 

Accelerate time to market through enhanced collaboration and automation that facilitates more efficient and faster workflows. 

Achieve end-to-end DevSecOps 

Cloudify’s comprehensive solutions include everything from CI/CD deployment and management to testing, so your DevOps teams have everything they need to create and release high-quality and secure code. 

Optimize costs 

You gain the ability to implement measures for locating unutilized live environments and terminate their operations which reduces costs by 30% within three months. 

Standardize DevOps enterprise-wide 

Access environment-agnostic technology and infrastructures to support any environment, among other industry-leading open-source CI/CD and DevOps tools that address complex CI/CD challenges, such as onboarding new technologies, validating/advancing deployments, and more.

Ready to scale up with Cloudify? Talk to our experts today.