CI/CD has been a major turning point in software development methodologies. It standardizes the workflows and tooling developers use, not unlike how a factory standardizes its work and machines to achieve greater output and better quality.
The widespread adoption of DevOps practices has increased the delivery velocity from a few big releases per year to many small releases per day, and we owe it to the standardization of workflows and innovations in tooling helping us build that software factory.
The Software Factory
And CI/CD are important parts of that factory. Continuous Integration allows teams to add new features to a software project without breaking the pipelines and the application, and teams don’t need to wait for a ‘milestone’ before it is included in the final release. This means they can adapt, experiment, and innovate quickly. Continuous Delivery allows teams to deploy any release as soon as all the automated tests pass to get quick feedback from actual users and customers, in order to improve quickly.
Those innovations deliver a better delivery loop, better communication between teams, and a more stable final product, at lower development costs by standardizing and automating repeatable tasks.
But what many don’t realize is that building the factory and using the factory to build your software products are vastly different things. And actually building the factory is not easy by any stretch of the imagination; requiring specialized knowledge and experience.
This is where companies like Cyrès come in. They see organizations struggle with building their software factories, choose the right tooling, adapt their culture, processes, and workflows to push decision-making to the tactical and operational level, how to change their change management processes, how to learn to trust the automated pipelines, and fill the internal skills gap. They know how difficult it can be for a company to make all those internal transformations.
Not only do they help their customers close the feedback loop and automate as many of the pipeline (which do not generate any revenue or profit, but simply have to be done to deliver a working product); they help teams to focus on delivering features.
GitOps: People, Process, and Product
A key aspect shared among their successful customers? GitOps; automating and abstracting cloud infrastructure, available to developers in their pipelines in a self-service, on-demand, secure manner, driving standardization, increased quality, better availability and a reduced cognitive load for infrastructure, cloud, and software engineers alike.
Before GitOps, a mistake in production could take ages to be detected, and there was always a need to contact the administrator that made the changes to debug. GitOps is a driver for reducing outages and issues in production environments, as the standardization and automation make it easier for Operational teams to solve them quickly by rolling back changes that contributed to the outage.
Tools like GitLab are crucial for GitOps, as they help standardize the way people work, collaborate and communicate. And it’s this trifecta of People, Process and Product that makes GitLab the right tool. It removes friction in collaboration (by changing how changes are communicated and approved), reduces problems during handovers (by making everything a piece of version-controlled code) between teams, helps the transfer of knowledge between teams (by documenting code) and removes common human mistakes (by automating and reducing toil).
Learn more with Cyrès
No wonder that Cyrès (website) spends a decent amount of time looking at the organizational friction and inertia, analyzing weaknesses, where and how teams lose time and efficiency, in addition to looking at the actual technological landscape and architecture. Cyrès works with champions and technical leaders to drive the changes needed to move towards a GitOps model, improving communication issues between Dev and Ops teams, removing silos in the organization, increase agility in project management, increase the level of automation and standardization, reduce the amount of toil and cognitive load teams have to deal with, and increase skills and knowledge where needed.
On Thursday, May 27th, at 11:00 CET, Loïc Eymael, Lead of DevOps at Cyrès will host a webinar (in French), focusing on a practical use case of their customers. Register here to join!
