Many developers will say that DevOps is the way forward (we’ve even said it ourselves many times), and there are good reasons for that. DevOps offers a singularly transformative approach to building great apps and services with continuous integration and continuous delivery while being capable of eliminating technical debt (eventually) as well as the usual delays and long project durations of the conventional development pipeline.
With DevOps, the development lifecycle of an app can be shortened considerably. Adding automation and quality control into the processes within the DevOps workflow as well as further optimizations through continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD, can considerably shorten the time it takes to innovate, test, and deploy new apps or features. In fact, some of the benefits of using CI/CD are too good to miss.
Faster Development and Iteration
As mentioned before, the main purpose of CI/CD usage is eliminating the need to wait for months—or even years—before a new build or feature can be delivered to the market. Every small change gets committed to a common repository, and the team is focused more on smaller tasks rather than a big development chunk.
In many ways, CI/CD automates DevOps and suits the development approach perfectly. Integration can be done several times a day on a collaborative repository, so committed code immediately gets checked and peer-reviewed.
CD, in particular, makes deployment faster. As long as the code integrates well during the CI workflow, migrating to deployment and delivering the finished iteration are both relatively easy to achieve. Combined with environments like Kubernetes, the entire delivery process can be made completely seamless.
Zero Disruption
That actually brings us to the next benefit of CI/CD, which is the absence of disruptions during the delivery of new iterations. Considering the agile nature of DevOps—and how quickly new releases can be made available to the market—seamless deployment is definitely a must.
CI/CD usage supports automated unit testing as part of the process that can identify errors and potentially faulty components even before the developed app reaches its true testing phase. The same is true with iterations and updates. Catastrophic errors on the market can be avoided completely with this approach.
Efficient Development
Thanks to the seamless and continuous workflow of DevOps, the use of CI/CD substantially increases efficiency levels in most—if not all—development projects. As long as the team is responsive to change and can keep up with the development challenges, you will end up with better quality code that is deployed faster every time.
That improvement in efficiency can also be seen in development and operational costs. For starters, you don’t have to spend as much time developing a version or an app, which means the budget for the development project can be reduced substantially. Even better, fewer errors mean there is no need to spend additional money firefighting multiple problems post-deployment.
Better Code Quality
It is difficult to talk about the benefits of CI/CD pipeline without talking about the improvement it brings to the quality of your code. Remember that every team member can work together on an iteration in a seamless way, and every change made to the collaborative repository can be reviewed by others for maximum compatibility.
This near-automated peer-review process adds an extra layer of quality control to the development process. Even issues with writing standards, lack of notes, and other minute problems can be addressed immediately.
That collaborative approach comes with one extra benefit: faster time-to-market. When the entire team can work together this seamlessly, pushing for a faster time-to-market doesn’t mean adding more risks and jeopardizing the entire development process. Faster time-to-market is a great competitive advantage to have in today’s world where technological advances are being made every day.
DevOps—and the use of CI/CD—is not without its challenges, but it should be clear that the benefits are well worth pursuing. Which is one of just many reasons why Caylent believes that DevOps is the way forward indeed.
For more on how to leverage CI/CD with Kubernetes, read Why Kubernetes Is Ideal for Your CI/CD Pipeline
Caylent is a cloud-native services company that helps organizations bring the best out of their people and technology using AWS. We are living in a software-defined world where technology is at the core of every business. To thrive in this paradigm, organizations need to empower their people and processes through technology. Caylent is uniquely positioned to fuel that engine of innovation by bringing ambitious ideas to life for our customers.
Caylent works with customers to build, scale and optimize sophisticated cloud solutions using deep subject matter expertise to deliver world-class outcomes through an agile co-delivery model.
