DevOps is no silver bullet, and without the correct execution, it is just another catchphrase. So, the adoption of DevOps needs an understanding of the different challenges that it will bring inherently. For example, one of the most significant challenges in scaling your DevOps is keeping up with the market pace while preserving the software quality.
Take an example of StrataMap that needed rapid development, change underlying architecture, and avoid a single point of failure. Developers at StartaMap used Docker-based AWS EC2 container service and AWS Codepipeline to introduce a new CICD pipeline.
Implementing a new CI/CD pipeline with DevOps best practices helped them scale, keeping the software quality intact. However, every organization is different, and what StrataMap used may not work for every DevOps scaling use case. So, here we are with some of the best practices to scale your DevOps and preserve the software quality.
1. Going Beta First
Scaling your DevOps needs consideration of several factors contributing to software code failures like:
- Need for intensive resources
- Lack of collaborative strategy
- Time to recover from failure
- Single point of failure challenge
- Rollback policy for feature failure
A gradual iterative process is one of the best approaches to cope with the challenges of scaling your DevOps. Therefore, the first step to DevOps scaling is introducing a beta version of your software. The idea is to test a specific set of features by a small sample size of users for early failure detections and rectifying the errors.
This approach minimizes the risk of exposing software code to many users. You can improve code quality and add features with each new version. After introducing the beta version, the next step will be to optimize different software versions until you reach a stable iteration.
However, going beta first is beneficial to improve software code continuously; you need to optimize each stage of the DevOps lifecycle for consistency.
2. Optimizing the DevOps lifecycle
DevOps lifecycle is a continuous loop of several phases which depicts collaborative and iterative approaches. So, you need to realize DevOps’ continuous nature before scaling the operations. This is where understanding of different lifecycle phases becomes vital.
Every DevOps lifecycle has seven phases, also known as the “7Cs of DevOps lifecycle”. These phases are:
- Continuous development phase involves continuously developing software, keeping up with the release backlog, and integrating user feedback with the process distributed into smaller releases.
- Continuous integration phase involves continuously updating the code or features and integrating them into the software.
- Continuous testing phase involves continuously testing the software code for bugs and errors to fix them before the integration phase quickly.
- Continuous deployment phase involves managing code configurations for deployment on servers and scheduling updates.
- Continuous feedback phase involves constant observation of the user’s behavior with software and making adjustments in the code accordingly.
- Continuous monitoring phase involves constant monitoring of the system to detect root causes for errors to reduce the chances of code failures.
Optimizing these 7Cs of the DevOps lifecycle will help you achieve consistent software code quality. Another way to ensure that your software code quality is on par with the industry standards is to monitor it.
3. Code Quality Monitoring
Monitoring code quality while scaling your DevOps will need extra efforts causing a slowdown for your continuous development, deployment, and delivery. So, the best approach is to use a code quality monitoring tool. Such a tool can help you measure different code quality metrics like:
- Code reliability is a measure of time for which the software code will run without failures.
- Code maintainability metric relates to how easily you can maintain the code based on consistency, complexity, and structure parameters.
- Code testability measures how many test cases you will need to find fault in a system.
- Code portability is a metric that allows you to understand how your software code behaves in different environments.
- Code reusability helps measure whether the existing code can be used again or not.
Monitoring the code quality metrics will help you maintain high standards and fine-tune software performance. Some of the code monitoring tools that you can use are:
- Crucible
- Codeac
- DeepScan
- Bandits
- SonarCloud
Extensive testing is one way to ensure that your software quality stays up to the mark while scaling the DevOps.
4. Test, Test & Test
Testing is like oxygen to the software development process. However, to maintain a high quality of software performance while scaling DevOps, you need to achieve continuous testing. This is an excellent recommendation on paper, but imagine the kind of resources and effort you need to test code along the DevOps lifecycle continuously?
The solution to this problem is the Shift-left testing approach. It is an approach where all the testing activities are pushed to the left of the development cycle. So, you can leverage parallel testing during the development phase to quickly detect and rectify errors.
However, parallel testing can be intensive for your DevOps, and that is where you can use automation. According to a survey, 94% of respondents reported using test automation and execution tools to reduce testing efforts. So, automation is not a trend anymore and has become a common practice among several organizations.
Some of the top test automation tools that you can use are:
- Selenium
- Appium
- LambdaTest
- TestComplete
- Worksoft
With the correct test execution and automation tools, you can achieve higher code consistency during the scaling of DevOps.
Conclusion
Software development is a team effort, so adopting DevOps makes more sense. When you scale DevOps, there are challenges in maintaining high-quality software code and consistency in performance. However, you can leverage some of the best practices we discussed to sustain software code quality during the scaling of DevOps.
Furthermore, these practices can be used together to achieve optimal performance. So, analyze your organizational requirements and formulate a DevOps plan to scale without missing the performance mark.
