Demystifying Inner Loop & Outer Loop Development with Red Hat OpenShift
What is the most important thing for developers? Or what really makes them happy?
While story points and the speed of deployments are important metrics in software development, they are not the most crucial factors for developers when it comes to their overall productivity and effectiveness.?The overall developer experience, including factors that influence their work environment and job satisfaction, can have a significant impact on their ability to create value for their organization. This is not something we are making up but is based on a survey conducted by GitHub in June 2023 and shared by GitHub Product Officer Inbal Shani in his blog.?????
???? Based on the GitHub survey results, writing code (32%) and finding & resolving security vulnerabilities (31%) are the top 2 daily tasks of development teams. On a typical project, developers reported working with an average of 21 other developers, and 52% claim they collaborate with other teams on a daily or weekly basis. Access to a fully configured development environment, according to 33% of developers, is crucial for effective team collaboration. Effective collaboration, as per the developers in the survey, results in better test coverage & faster, cleaner, more secure code writing – all of which are best practices for any development team.
????? The necessity for efficient & collaborative development workflows has never been more crucial than in today’s fast-paced software development world. The division of the end-to-end developer flow into an inner loop & outer loop standardizes application delivery & helps developers innovate and collaborate better.
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Inner Loop and Outer Loop Development?
Inner Loop:
The inner loop represents a developer's individual workflow. A single developer can establish and employ an inner loop, which is often characterized by its rapid and iterative nature, to efficiently code and test alterations. Changes to code can be swiftly implemented and their outcomes observed immediately by developers. Here are some of the activities that are typically carried out within the inner loop:
1. Coding: Code is authored by developers in their chosen IDE or code editor.
2. Compilation: The code is compiled by developers, ensuring the absence of semantic and syntactic errors.
3. Testing: Tests are devised and executed by developers to confirm the intended functionality of their code.
4. Debugging: Debuggers are utilized by developers to systematically examine and rectify bugs within their code, scrutinizing it line by line.
5. Code Push: The code is pushed into a version control system by developers.
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Outer Loop:
The outer loop comes into play once a developer has pushed their feature or code to the enterprise GitHub repository. Responsible for integrating all code and configuration changes into the target environment without compromising the organization's security and compliance standards, the outer loop ensures a seamless and secure deployment process. Here are some of the activities that typically occur in the outer loop:
1. Deployment: Container images are deployed to a shared cluster by developers.
2. Management: Developers oversee the entire lifecycle of their applications, handling tasks such as scaling, updates, and rollbacks.
3. Code Review: After the developer has submitted the code to the version control system, senior developers review it meticulously to ensure compliance, correctness, and the absence of a negative impact on other developers' code.
Benefits of using ?inner loop and outer loop development
Several benefits are associated with the utilization of inner loop and outer loop development. These benefits include:
1.?Enhanced Productivity: Programmers are aided in working more effectively by both inner and outer loops. The inner loop permits quick code modifications with immediate results. Once modifications are deemed satisfactory, they can be introduced into the outer loop for further testing and validation.
2.?Higher Quality: The quality of programs is elevated through the assistance provided by both the inner and outer loops. Early issue detection and resolution are facilitated by developers through frequent application testing and deployment. This can contribute to a reduction in the occurrence of program bugs.
3.?Reduced Risk:?The risk associated with delivering changes to production can be minimized through the use of both the inner and outer loops. Developers have the opportunity to identify and rectify potential issues before they impact end-users in production, as they test and validate their changes in a staging environment.
4.?Enhanced Agility: The outer loop empowers teams to swiftly and confidently deploy changes to production while upholding a strong focus on security and reliability.
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Inner Loop and Outer Loop Development with Red Hat OpenShift
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Inner Loop
??? For enhancing developer experience, the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers a variety of development services. assisting developers with automated builds and deploys to hide complexity. The inner loop typically consists of a single developer operating in her own, isolated development environment such as IDE. That is where Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces comes into the picture.
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Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces is a collaborative Kubernetes-native solution built on the open-source ?Eclipse Che project for rapid application development, that delivers a consistent developer environment on Red Hat OpenShift. It provides a consistent, secure, and zero-configuration to any member of the development or IT team with a consistent, secure and zero- configuration. The experience is as fast and familiar as an integrated development environment on your laptop.
???????????? My previous blog would give you more details about OpenShift Dev Spaces and how it enhances developer productivity.
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Outer Loop
???? The outer loop's primary needs are to guarantee that the most recent configuration and code changes may always be built, deployable, and automatically applied to the target environments. The first two needs are covered by CI/CD implementation with OpenShift Pipelines. Continuous deployment can be taken care of using OpenShift GitOps which makes sure that the enterprise Git repository and the target environments are constantly in sync.
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Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines is a cloud-native, continuous integration & and continuous delivery solution that enables developers to securely build containerized applications and deploy them to OpenShift. Just like any other Red Hat product, OpenShift Pipelines is based on a powerful and flexible open-source framework for creating CI/CD systems, Tekton. Tekton is a graduated Linux Continuous Delivery Foundation project and follows the OpenSSF best practices. Tekton Hub provides a catalog of Tekton task templates. There are many advantages ?of using OpenShift Pipelines, including:
??? Highly Scalable: Resources are only used during pipeline runs with no central server to maintain.
? Highly Secure: Pipeline runs execution is isolated via containers.
Improved Productivity: OpenShift pipelines provide a pipeline-builder which is a simple interface to easily create pipelines. Pipelines can be stored as code(YAML files) in GitHub. Pipelines are a set of tasks. Each task is modular and can be easily re-used across pipelines once defined.???????
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?? Git is used as a single source of truth for both the desired and actual states of the system in the world of software development. It takes a declarative approach to managing infrastructure and applications, so you declare the desired state of the system in Git, and the GitOps tool works to bring the system into alignment with the desired state. Based on the open-source project Argo CD, Red Hat OpenShift GitOps offers a comparable set of features to those offered by the upstream, as well as more automation, integration with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and the advantages of Red Hat's enterprise support, quality assurance, and focus on enterprise security. There are several benefits to using OpenShift GitOps, including:
Increased productivity: GitOps automates the process of managing and deploying applications, allowing developers to concentrate on other projects.
Improved reliability: GitOps works to ensure that applications are constantly deployed in the desired condition, which can increase dependability and decrease downtime.
Multi-cluster consistency: GitOps with Advanced Cluster Manager for Kubernetes can be used to configure many clusters and deployments reliably and consistently.
Enhanced security: GitOps can contribute to increased security by serving as a single source of truth for the ideal system state. This might make it simpler to find and address security flaws.
Image Source credit: https://develop.cloudnativetoolkit.dev/resources/workshop/cd/
The Inner Loop and Outer Loop development using OpenShift provides a thorough and effective strategy for creating contemporary software. All the above-mentioned tools are part of the standard OpenShift Container Platform subscription and are easily available as an operator in the Operator Hub for installation and usage. There are also available for you to play around as part of Red Hat OpenShift Sandbox.
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Co-Founder of Krunch | 500 Global backed | Personalise your AI with Nakamai | Investor
10 个月Hi Ramya, fantastic read! I've got to say, your breakdown of the inner and outer loop development really hit the nail on the head. Seeing how Red Hat OpenShift fits into this picture just makes so much sense. It's like having the best of both worlds - boosting our day-to-day coding work (that inner loop magic) and then making the bigger team stuff (the outer loop) run smoothly, it's great to see someone putting the spotlight on how important it is to balance these two sides. Thanks for sharing this!
Director, GSI Lab | WW Ecosystem | Digital Technology Lab | API Economy | IBM Software Labs | Advisory Board at Sales Panther | D&I Advocate
1 年Well done Ramya Raghuveera keep it going!
Director, EY Client Technology Engineering | EY Fabric Experience| Developer Experience | Ex IBM Distinguished Engineer
1 年hope we helped :)