Rethinking DevOps in WFH: Increased CI/CD in Remote Environment

Remote work is the new normal.

COVID-19 has caused a never-before crisis since WHO declared coronavirus a global pandemic. Remote work, social distancing, and self-isolation became part of our lives.

While the IT industry managed to keep digital businesses running amid this pandemic, teams are accepting and adjusting to this new normal. Ability to adapt to change and flexibility are of vital importance in times like this where borders are closed and businesses are forced to shut their operations.

Almost all IT companies, regardless of their services and size, adopted WFH and navigated through the COVID-19 phase. Owing to technologies like cloud and enhanced Infrastructure Management, remote work is possible with ease. One such concept that has captured attention worldwide among IT teams is DevOps.

This phase has made companies rethink their core service models and incorporate modern approaches like DevOps to adapt changes rapidly and smoothly.

COVID Situation Has Witnessed Increased CI/CD Adoption: How DevOps Help Companies Sail Through Remote Work?

Companies felt moving from old silos and work together years ago. Old development approaches no longer work and failed to give the desired results. DevOps came into the market many years ago but many companies haven’t recognized the need to move to the new model.

DevOps development model is based on Agile methodology and imposes Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) practices.

Just reminding what DevOps is:

DevOps: A Culture Of Collaboration And Communication

DevOps is more about culture and less about tools. It involves a set of practices to automate and integrate development processes between teams so that they can develop software at great speed and efficiency.

Unlike traditional models, it insists on development and operations teams to work together and ensure faster development, testing, and delivery more often than releasing everything at once.

In this uncertain time, organizations are exploring new ways and methods to increase productivity and performance. Also, organizations are rethinking their working models to handle such turbulent times in the future.

Increase Productivity And Improve Workflow With DevOps Adoption In COVID-19

Here are some foreseeable results companies can get from DevOps:

• Focus on People:

DevOps is about people, process, and technology. People are an important part of digital transformation. DevOps involves everyone in the team — developers, managers, creative members, business consultants, ops engineers, and many others. This ensures that they work together, collaborate more often, and continuously deliver value by adding new features and optimizing performance.

It helps teams to plan, build, test, and deploy together and bridges gaps between teams.

The remote environment requires a sense of collaboration. Interaction with people rather than tools seems more advantageous in this difficult and stressful situation.

• Collaboration and Communication:

In a culture like DevOps, teams share same goals and work upon that to constantly improving the product and deliver the value. Communication remains a strategic factor in successful companies even at present. Using more advanced, faster, and reliable communication channels and by collaborating frequently, teams are capable of delivering high-quality products faster.

• More Advanced Tools:

Using more advanced tools to establish a continuous chain requires everyone’s participation and knowledge.

Scattered Teams, Work From Home, DevOps Workflow: How it looks like?

• Developers choose technology stack as per needs and start developing in a development environment with approaches like Microservices or choose AKS or Docker.
• Push code to repository hosting service like GitHub and consider checking for bugs/features and keep tracking changes.
• Peer code review and continuous integration of code enable individual developers to work collaboratively and help improve coding practices.
• Maintain branches of code as per feature or new model development.
• CI here refers to automatic processes to integrate the code so that developers do not need to repeat the step every time they merge the code.
• CI also makes it easier to test the code primarily and rectify before moving to the staging, testing, or UAT server.
• You can customize an environment like Dev, Staging, UAT, Test, and Production. You can automate the deployment or release cycle by having Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline.

This process will help:

• Establish a culture in a remote environment that encourages team members to work on a shared vision and build good bonding with each other.
• This is a time to tackle the situation wisely and prepare cross-functional teams for the future.
• Focus on an individual’s learning and creating opportunities to thrive.
• Rethinking organizational structure as a whole and make significant changes to improve strategy, performance, and technology stack.

What Products Can Be Used?

You can choose from a range of flavors and tools to implement CI/CD pipelines, such as:

• Jira or Azure Boards for Planning
• Jenkins, TeamCity, CircleCI, Travis CI, Bamboo, for CI/CD
• GitLab, GitHub for DevOps-enabled Software Development Platforms
• Appium, Selenium for Continuous Testing
• Puppet, Ansible, Chef for Infrastructure & Configuration Management
• Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, Kubernetes for Containerized Application Development
• Azure DevOps for complete DevOps Lifecycle Management

Dependency On Cloud:

Fortunately, cloud computing and remote access are now easier-to-use, enabling companies to access and manage storage and data securely. Cost-effective internet availability, modern infrastructure management tools, and communication technologies are critically important to get the job done in this turbulent time.

Continuously experimenting, learning, and thinking on new ideas help companies adopt this new normal and ease out this difficult phase.

Utilize this time to make a new routine, new goals, and a new environment that works for you.

What Is Your DevOps Journey?

If you have already applied DevOps and working in a ‘Continuous’ environment, let me know how you are coping up with tasks in the corona crisis via comment section. If you are yet to implement DevOps in a remote environment, I would love to know your strategies and roadmap.