Continuous Integration, Delivery, Deployment and Maturity Model 2023

Like any distributed system, this has some benefits, but also creates additional challenges. In this episode, Tejas Shikhare explains the pros and cons of scaling GraphQL adoption.

We’ve put together a high-level CI / CD Maturity guide to help with these challenges. We list all the processes and practices that need to be in place before you can truly claim that you have made Continuous Deployments possible. The guide makes certain basic assumptions i.e. it assumes your code is managed in a version control system. We specifically omit certain items such as microservices since you can achieve CD without using microservices. Depending on your organization, your end goal may be to have changes deployable within a day . Or your goal may be to achieve continuous deployment, with updates being shipped if they pass all stages of the pipeline successfully.

Key Factors for an Efficient DevOps Maturity Model

Optimizer combines related scripts together into build layers and minifies them via UglifyJS . You will receive continuous feedback on incremental process upgrades, automation, and culture. Every product should have its testing environment, and testing should be automated. To ensure you’re not leaving any gaps, you should frequently do risk evaluations and ongoing analysis and validation of your test coverage. Mature software engineering practices include automation at every stage of Continuous Delivery, but industry-wide standard measures of Supply Chain Maturity remain elusive. A detailed explanation of what each level of GitOps maturity looks like in practice.

This allows to get a fast and automated feedback on production-readiness of your software with each commit. A very high degree of automated testing is an essential part to enable Continuous Delivery. DevOps is a long-term commitment, and it is constantly improving and evolving day by day. Adopting tools that automate and speed up processes is an essential part of it. DevOps Maturity Model helps determine the progress of your organization’s journey in DevOps, making it easier for you to enhance the release rate, improve the organizational workflow, and ensure test accuracy.

As teams mature they will want some form of source code analysis to verify coding standards and rules compliance. Feedback on database performance and deployment for each release. Your maturity model creates a spectrum upon which organizations can place themselves, as well as set a target for the future. Continuous Delivery is all about seeing the big picture, to consider all aspects that affect the ability to develop and release your software.

Stages in DevOps Maturity Journey

JCGs is an independent online community focused on creating the ultimate Java to Java developers resource center; targeted at the technical architect, technical team lead , project manager and junior developers alike. JCGs serve the Java, SOA, Agile and Telecom communities with daily news written by domain experts, articles, tutorials, reviews, announcements, code snippets and open source projects. Maturity Models allow a team or organization to assess its methods and process against a clearly defined benchmark. During this phase, DevOps practices are implemented within small teams or small-scale projects but not extended broadly to the whole organization. Automation is happening on a small scale, and cross-team collaboration gets emphasized between the Dev and Ops teams.

Remember that it’s important to provision the application infrastructure for all required environments, keep environment configuration in check and dispose of any intermediate environments in the process. Since databases schema changes are sometimes delicate, make sure to include your DBA team into the peer review process, so that changes are 1) code; 2) can be merged and patched; 3) can be code reviewed. Any team working on software development requires a member capable of creating technical procedures and allocating resources. It facilitates the merging of a new code into the main code base. The idea allows one to run various types of tests at each stage and complete it by launching with the deployment of the system in the actual product that end-users see.

Continuous Delivery Maturity Models provide frameworks for assessing your progress towards adopting and implementing continuous integration, delivery and deployment (CI/CD). Not directly it’s original intention, but I intend to use your model as a grading tool in a semester on DevOps at a University of Applied science in the Netherlands. Students will need to achieve at least ‘intermediate’ level for a sufficient score. Tobias Palmborg, Believes that Continuous Delivery describes the vision that scrum, XP and the agile manifesto once set out to be. Continuous Delivery is not just about automating the release pipeline but how to get your whole change flow, from grain to bread ,in a state of the art shape. Former Head of Development at one of europes largest online gaming company.

As you are now aware of the fundamental principles required for DevOps maturity, the next step is to determine your organization’s current position and which level to ascend to. Below are the 5 phases every organization encounters on the journey to reach DevOps maturity. Nowadays Terraform is one of the pioneer tools used to manage modern infrastructure. DevOps transformation, automation, data, and metrics are my preferred areas. 19% of respondents in your category said they deploy code to production weekly. Another way to excel in ‘flow’ is by moving to distributed version control systems like Git, which is all about quick iterations, branching and merging – all things you need in a lean DevOps environment.Learn more here.

Go lean with Agile & Git

At the advanced level you will have split the entire system into self contained components and adopted a strict api-based approach to inter-communication so that each component can be deployed and released individually. With a mature component based architecture, where every component is a self-contained releasable unit with business value, you can achieve small and frequent releases and extremely short release cycles. This continuous delivery model allows the business to receive a return on investment as soon as possible and also reduce risky and repetitive tasks.

• Expert practices will include zero touch continuous deployment to production where every commit can potentially make it all the way to production automatically.
• At each stage, businesses must assess their maturity levels and determine their areas of emphasis.
• At this level real time graphs and other reports will typically also include trends over time.
• Stefania Chaplin is looking at OWASP recommendations and Kubernetes best practices to find out more about how to secure microservices and reduce vulnerability traversal.
• Similar to Build & Deploy, maturity in this category will involve tools and automation.
• Continuous Integration is a software development practice that aims for a frequent integration of individual pieces of work.

It means that every change to the system, i.e. every commit, can be released for production at the push of a button. This means that every commit made to the workspace is a release candidate for production. This release however is still a manual process and require an explicit push of a button.

What is a DevOps Maturity Model?

These tests are especially valuable when working in a highly component based architecture or when good complete integration tests are difficult to implement or too slow to run frequently. At this level you will most likely start to look at gradually automating parts of the acceptance testing. While integration tests are component specific, acceptance tests typically span over several components and across multiple systems. Expert practices will include zero touch continuous deployment to production where every commit can potentially make it all the way to production automatically. Build and deployment is of course core to Continuous Delivery and this is where a lot of tools and automation come into the pipeline; this is what is most is commonly perceived when Continuous Delivery is discussed. At first glance a typical mature delivery pipeline can be very overwhelming; depending on how mature the current build and deployment process is in the organization, the delivery pipeline can be more or less complex.

Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are closely related, so I’ll refer to both as CD from now on for simplicity. Nowadays a lot can be accomplished with less pain using technologies such as containers and serverless, but you still need to coordinate all cloud and related dependencies, such as container orchestrators. Large «enterprise» suites claiming they can solve all your problems.

Often times these solutions create complications and bottlenecks for small projects that do not need to collaborate with 5000 developers and multiple product lines, or multiple versions. On the other hand some companies need greater central control over the build and release process across their enterprise development groups. At this level the work with modularization will evolve into identifying and breaking out modules into components that are self-contained and separately deployed. At this stage it will also be natural to start migrating scattered and ad-hoc managed application and runtime configuration into version control and treat it as part of the application just like any other code.

Instead of having a separate process, disaster recovery is simply done by pushing out the last release from the pipeline like any other release. This together with virtualization gives extreme flexibility in setting up test and production environments with minimum manual effort. At this level real time graphs and other reports will typically also include trends over time. At intermediate level, builds are typically triggered from the source control system on each commit, tying a specific commit to a specific build. Tagging and versioning of builds is automated and the deployment process is standardized over all environments.

The model will indicate which practices are essential, which should be considered advanced or expert and what is required to move from one level to the next. This is why we created the Continuous Delivery Maturity Model, to give structure and understanding to the implementation of Continuous Delivery and its core components. With this model we aim to be broader, to extend the concept beyond automation and spotlight all the key aspects you need to consider for a successful Continuous Delivery implementation across the entire organization.

All teams need some form of build automation whether they use shell scripts or dedicated build scripting frameworks like Maven, Ant, VBScript or MSBuild. These build automation scripts should be run by the developers every time they want to commit their code to the source repository. These build scripts should compile the source continuous delivery maturity model code into executable artifacts checking and validating syntax along the way. Some interpreted languages such as PHP do not require a build phase. One of the first considerations a PM needs to address is the project team’s Release Management Maturity. The various tools fit into levels of maturity for the project teams process.

Business Benefits of DevOps Maturity

The transition to DevOps entails a shift in the working culture of the business, backed by several techniques and frameworks. Organizations still witness siloed operations even after a year of DevOps journey with some automation but acknowledge the value of the new skill. At this phase, making errors can be vital to the learning process.

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Each of the matrix’s 30 elements defines a required discipline an organization needs to follow, to be considered at that level of maturity within that practice. The list is quite intimidating so we’ve highlighted the practices we think you should focus on when starting on this journey. The high priority practices were chosen because they give the most impact in terms of productivity, quality, delivery and risk mitigation. As part of deployment, you should also review your provisioning tasks and requirements.

The automation process facilitates development, testing, and production in a DevOps cycle, reducing time and improving resource efficiency. Further, it annihilates recurring operations and improves deployment speed. It might seem strange to state that verifying expected business result is an expert practice but this is actually something that is very rarely done as a natural part of the development and release process today. Verifying expected business value of changes becomes more natural when the organization, culture and tooling has reached a certain maturity level and feedback of relevant business metrics is fast and accessible.

Infrastructure handling abilities related to automation and supporting self-service concerning store settings are at the core of DevOps maturity model assessment, particularly when connected to other enterprises. The actual implementation of the pipeline, tools used, and processes may differ but the fundamental concept of 100% automation is the key. Even though most firms have implemented DevOps to some extent in their software development processes, many of them are yet to unlock the full potential of DevOps.

Now this third team has shifted security to the left with DevSecOps and embedding security operations across the DevOps process. There is another team that has implemented AI-driven automation and zero touch deployment. Based on the analysis and assessment of your current state of software supply chain and operations, you can decide your objective to level up your processes. All they aim is to achieve speed, stability, availability, and https://globalcloudteam.com/ security of their software delivery capability but clueless with the bullet-proof next step to adopt and integrate a new process. The result is a system that is totally reproducible from source control, from the O/S and all the way up to application. Doing this enables you to reduce a lot of complexity and cost in other tools and techniques for e.g. disaster recovery that serves to ensure that the production environment is reproducible.

What is a Continuous Delivery Maturity Model?

Wants to change the way we look at systems development today, moving it to the next level where we focus more time on developing features than doing manually repetitive tasks. Where we visualize and understand the path from idea to where it is released and brings business value. In this category we want to show the importance of handling this information correctly when adopting Continuous Delivery. Information must e.g. be concise, relevant and accessible at the right time to the right persons in order to obtain the full speed and flexibility possible with Continuous Delivery. Apart from information directly used to fulfill business requirements by developing and releasing features, it is also important to have access to information needed to measure the process itself and continuously improve it.