Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are a vital part of every project. At Stack Labs, this is one of the pillars of our work and of our team. It’s kind of like having a person looking over our shoulder, checking if we do our work well. By automating building, testing, linting, deploying and testing code, we free ourselves up for more meaningful work. Because who likes to do the repetitive and boring tasks, anyway?
CI/CD can do almost anything, but Keep it Simple
if you can do it through the command line, you can do it from the CI is a grounding principle of Stack Labs. They see pipelines everywhere, and use them for all kinds of applications, even for infrastructure development.
By implementing automation for repetitive tasks directly into CI, they can be used over and over again, often for months without a single modification. This does mean that simple is better: complexity requires attention and hand-holding, while simple automations and standard tools make our lives simpler.
Many of our customers are building containers and deploying them into the Cloud with Kubernetes. And while we could use a figurative Christmas tree with all kinds of bells and whistles, using the standard ecosystem of tools made more sense. We don’t use anything fancy, but it works.
This way, we save time, versus making elaborate and complex solutions. When we are working on a small team, often called “pizza team“, we can’t spend too much time on repetitive tasks.
And bigger teams increase the risk of human error, and the risk exponentially grows as the team size and number of teams expand. With CI, we can reduce the pressure on teams by delegating tasks to the CI in order to focus on important points, like development or support and analysis. We also gain the possibility to simplify the team cooperation, because we can chain pipelines between projects and trigger things in cascade.
Common CI/CD pitfalls
But don’t kill innovation and speed of execution by a desire of uniformization between CI/CD pipelines. Organizations are composed of many teams, and they should be able to work independently if they need to. That means supporting them with automating common tasks in CI/CD, but also giving them the freedom to develop their own automation.
Helping teams is important, to guide them in the right direction. But forcing them to follow some strict rules just to standardize things is counterproductive. The CI/CD is part of the code and the team should adapt it to their needs, customize it when required and improve it if necessary.
Stack Labs DevOps Philosophy
In an upcoming webinar, Stack Labs’ CTO Kevin will talk about the DevOps philosophy. Nowadays, DevOps is often seen as a job, but it isn’t. DevOps is a philosophy that can bring together a lot of people, even out of the technical sphere of software development.
At Stack Labs, we are a team of passionate people helping companies with their digital projects. Moving to the cloud, improving their application scalability, development of advanced frontend applications, setting up their delivery pipeline: we are doers who love improving everything around development.
