continuous delivery

Continuous Integration/Continuous Development with FOSS Tools

Quentin Hartman — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 11:30:00 +0000

Up your DevOps game! Get the fundamentals of CI/CD with FOSS tools now!

One of the hottest topics within the DevOps space is Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). This attention has drawn lots of investment dollars, and a vast array of proprietary Software As A Service (SaaS) tools have been created in the CI/CD space, which traditionally has been dominated by free open-source software (FOSS) tools. Is FOSS still the right choice with the low cost of many of these SaaS options?

It depends. In many cases, the cost of self-hosting these FOSS tools will be greater than the cost to use a non-FOSS SaaS option. However, even in today's cloud-centric and SaaS-saturated world, you may have good reasons to self-host FOSS. Whatever those reasons may be, just don't forget that "Free" isn't free when it comes to keeping a service running reliably 24/7/365. If you're looking at FOSS as a means to save money, make sure you account for those costs.

Even with those costs accounted for, FOSS still delivers a lot of value, especially to small and medium-sized organizations that are taking their first steps into DevOps and CI/CD. Starting with a commercialized FOSS product is a great middle ground. It gives a smooth growth path into the more advanced proprietary features, allowing you to pay for those only once you need them. Often called Open Core, this approach isn't universally loved, but when applied well, it has allowed for a lot of value to be created for everyone involved.

An Embarrassment of Riches

The DevOps concept exploded in the past several years. The term quickly saturated the mainstream technology industry. With this increased mindshare comes a corresponding increase in the number of tools available to accomplish DevOps-related tasks. That's a blessing and a curse as a DevOps practitioner. Thanks to the endless buffet of options, you're sure to find something that meets your needs, but to a newcomer, the multitude of choices is overwhelming. Combine that with the vast scope of tasks that fall under the DevOps umbrella and the competing claims of "best" from all sides, and you have a recipe for paralysis. A good place for finding tools and filtering by a variety of criteria is DevOpsBookmarks.com. The content is all open source, and the maintainers are diligent about merging contributions, but it hasn't seen a lot of updates lately. Despite that, it makes a great jumping off point. If you find something noteworthy that should be included, a pull request would be appreciated!

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Puppet Redefines Infrastructure Automation

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 15 May 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Puppet has long been regarded as nothing more than an open-source software configuration management tool. The company has become a standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. Well, this is about to change. Puppet has evolved and has positioned itself to tackle enterprise-grade problems. All of this and more, was announced on May 2, 2019.

So what makes this announcement so exciting? I sat down with Matt Waxman, Puppet's Head of Products to learn more.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Matt Waxman: I have been the Head of Products at Puppet since 2017. I have been in the Product space for at least 20 years, largely focused on infrastructure. Before coming to Puppet, I was in data storage backup, replication and disaster recovery. I am the guy who deals with roadmaps and user experience across our product portfolio.

Petros: What can you tell us about this announcement?

Matt Waxman: Automation of more than just the state of your virtual machines, containers and so on is extremely important. How do you enable more teams? It is all about service, safety and quality of delivery. This is what we are doing with Puppet to serve those exact needs. And with our latest release 2019.1, we simplify the experience in automation to meet those demands.

We enhanced our agentless and agent-based capabilities, such as supporting the automation of network devices (for example, Cisco and Palo Alto) and giving users the ability to automate anything and anywhere quickly, efficiently, safely and at scale. But some of our most notable changes are centered around our agentless task runner, Bolt. We introduced it about a year and a half ago. Bolt is an automation tool built to automate anything in your infrastructure without the hassle. It was very well received by the Open Source community. What is new here though is we have found that more and more customers and users are starting to automate from a development perspective. Developers have a constant need to stand up an infrastructure quickly for both testing and support. Not only did we make Bolt more user-friendly for the broader community, but we also added YAML support.

Petros: Why is this announcement so exciting?

Matt Waxman: The demand for infrastructure-focused automation is growing, and many companies are unable to scale to meet that demand. With release 2019.1, we made a lot of investment in not only addressing this challenge but also in simplifying the experience.

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CI/CD and the New Generation of Software Delivery: an Interview with Harness

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 13:15:15 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is all the rage in the modern world of software development. But actually what is this pipeline process? It's a method or set of principles for which development teams implement and deliver code more frequently and reliably.

Continuous integration embodies a coding philosophy and set of practices propelling teams to implement small and frequent code changes into version control repositories, while the continuous delivery picks up where the CI ends and automates the application's delivery

Many platforms, such as Jenkins and CircleCI, exist to help companies and teams streamline the development and integration of their software stacks, but not much exists in the way of easing and automating the process of delivery. And with what does exist, the solutions tend to fall short with features and functionality, or they are overly complicated to configure in the first place.

This is where Harness comes into the picture. Harness produces the industry's very first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform. Using machine learning, it simplifies and automates the entire CD process. Steve Burton, VP of marketing at Harness, recently took the time to share more details with me.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Steve Burton: While officially the VP of marketing, I am a DevOps Evangelist over at Harness. What this means is that I do a little bit of everything. While most of my career has been in product management and marketing, I stepped out of the university with a bachelor's degree in computer science and an initial career in Java development (ca. 2004 at Sapient), working on large-scale enterprise J2EE implementations. Prior to Harness, I did geek stuff at AppDynamics, Moogsoft and Glassdoor. And when not knee-deep in take, I enjoy spending my time watching F1 and researching cars on the web.

PK: What is Harness?

SB: We provide Continuous Delivery as-a-Service. It's the CD bit of the CI/CD equation that helps customers automate how their software is deployed and delivered to end users in production.

We basically allow customers to move fast without breaking things, so they can increase developer velocity without the risk of downtime or failure.

PK: What problem or problems does Harness solve?

SB: Developers are under tremendous pressure to deliver applications to production, fast and with zero error. It's a constant pain, one that I personally dealt with as a former Java developer. Our founders had also seen this challenge firsthand, and that's why they started Harness.

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