A Maturity Model for Continuous Delivery

• April 14, 2022
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• Software development

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Advanced CD implementations have almost completely automated code’s journey from integration testing through various stages of test deployments onto production systems. So, if the entire CD process can launch with one command, why are there still two higher levels of CD maturity? Although testing is automated, many organizations are reluctant to cede control over the release to production, and, thus, might require a manual approval step before code gets promoted to the next stage of deployment. The lowest maturity level is sometimes called the initial or regressive state because it is highly inefficient.

Your assessment will give you a good base when planning the implementation of Continuous Delivery and help you identify initial actions that will give you the best and quickest effect from your efforts. 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. Service Mesh – A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for aiding inter-service communications between microservices. A service mesh improves the collaboration between development and operations by providing a centralized place to manage microservices at runtime. This enables developers to focus on the code, while operations focus on the underlying infrastructure. This results in an environment that is more resilient, scalable, and secure.

The bedrock of DevOps, the continuous improvement mindset, is so ingrained that teams can accurately describe how they’re improving. It’s not just that, either; they can say by how much and over what time windows. The product team makes decisions about what features to prioritize based on hard data and conversations with key customers. Project management teams should continue to refine their processes to focus on releasing the minimum viable product for each release. Along with changes to the operations, QA, and compliance timelines, the release cadence should speed up so that more, smaller releases are happening more frequently.

What Makes a DevOps Maturity Model?

There are no manual tasks required, making the process easily measurable and predictable. There is none or minimal human intervention (zero-touch) on each deployment, and they are executed continually. The goal of CI/CD is to deliver better quality software by preventing issues before they occur by testing earlier. This comes from the ability to identify defects and quality issues on smaller changes in code, earlier in the process.

• Continuous Delivery is the next logical step of Continuous Integration.
• Such an architecture minimizes the risk of cascading failures, contains independent modules that function without impacting others, and facilitates fast deployments and easier testing.
• The existing tests were leveraged, we had already identified means to measure quality metrics.
• We reached a point where we followed IaaC guidelines to manage infrastructure.
• DevOps Maturity Model is a conceptual model that determines where an organization stands in the DevOps course, which direction it is heading, and decides what you need to do to achieve desired outcomes.
• The project management team begins to shift their focus from undertaking big, challenging projects to thinking about the products their team supports and the best ways to improve them as a whole.
• Every company targeting DevOps maturity should undergo this cultural transformation as DevOps maturity requires cross-functional collaboration and the unity of every stakeholder, from engineers to executives.

3Pillar Global uses DevOps as a critical part of our digital product development. Download our Free DevOps guide where we discuss the benefits and common challenges experienced with DevOps or contact us. Serverless Architectures – Reduces the maintenance of infrastructure and allows the use of more flexible and reliable practices, with increased agility and reduced TCO.

CI/CD (Build, Deployment & Release)

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. Much like the fixes at level 1, the best way out of level 2 is through constant incremental improvement.

Strong believer that Continuous Delivery and DevOps is the natural step in the evolution of Agile and Lean movement. 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 https://globalcloudteam.com/ repetitive tasks. Where we visualize and understand the path from idea to where it is released and brings business value. At the base level in this category it is important to establish some baseline metric for the current process, so you can start to measure and track.

Structure and Process

Below are the 5 phases every organization encounters on the journey to reach DevOps maturity. How leading organizations are extending quality strategies across the enterprise application landscape, from SAP to Salesforce and beyond. After a quick review of “Continuous integration tools and best practices”, I also did read more about “Continuous Delivery “, and I found some great articles about it that worth to read by every sysadmin, developer, and DevOps. The result is the first pass at an evolving Infrastructure as Code Maturity Model.

Engineering teams can begin to add automated tests to validate the quality of each software build. The project management team begins to shift their focus from undertaking big, challenging projects ci cd maturity model to thinking about the products their team supports and the best ways to improve them as a whole. Engineering teams involve compliance and QA organizations much earlier in the SDLC.

DevOps Maturity Model Key Factors

Releases are disconnected from deployment, and features can be hidden using flags or configuration values. No downtime is required whenever getting a new version to production, and once it’s there, application health is measured on different intensities and aspects to ensure everything is working correctly. By this point, compliance and quality assurance are so built into the development process that they sign off on code shortly after it’s written. An extensive, high-quality suite of tests means that deployments happen very soon after code has been finished.

As teams mature they will want some form of source code analysis to verify coding standards and rules compliance. Technology that makes it simple to roll back and forth between database versions. Health monitoring for applications and environments and proactive handling of problems.

Five levels

Continuous Delivery requires a cultural transformation as well and feeds into the growing DevOps movement. Top performing teams have the culture and automation in place that enables them to deliver changes faster with higher quality, and with more control for less effort.However, adoption of automation has been uneven. There are many paths to improving your development automation efforts, but where to start? When seeking these benefits, it is useful to have a guide.In this talk, Eric presents a simple model for scoring the maturity of your organizations efforts across Build, Deployment, Testing, and Release.

By adopting a more focused attitude and structured process for continuous improvement, teams will recognize that they can improve each of the other facets incrementally and independently. Made process changes to test and run database migrations in lower environments before running them in production. We added checks in the deployment system to ensure the state of database does not change with formal approval. While these 5 stages make a complete DevOps maturity model, it’s imperative for enterprises to keep checking their maturity at every step, and eventually identify focus areas and ways to evolve in the overall journey. DevOps has transformed the IT industry by changing how teams operate and collaborate in the process chain and workflow.

In this whitepaper we outline a maturity model based on experiences working with leading edge organizations who are implementing GitOps delivery pipelines. The CMM focuses on code development, but in the era of virtual infrastructure, agile automated processes and rapid delivery cycles, code release testing and delivery are equally important. The most effective improvement processes, whether they streamline manufacturing operations or speed up software development, describe the path to desired improvements — not just the end state. Continuous improvement processes never focus on the end state, because perfection, however it’s defined, can only be incrementally approached, never fully achieved.

Challenges of Implementing DevOps

At expert level some organizations choose to make a bigger effort and form complete cross functional teams that can be completely autonomous. With extremely short cycle time and a mature delivery pipeline, such organizations have the confidence to adopt a strict roll-forward only strategy to production failures. As applications gain prevalence as a source of competitive advantage, business leaders are becoming more aware of how critical speed and quality are when delivering applications to users. Issues with build quality or performance can negatively impact the user experience.

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The automation phase, the third level of DevOps maturity, involves more automation to perform essential tasks. Continuous Integration is a software practice that require developers to commit their code to the main workspace, at least once, possibly several times a day. Its expected that the developers have run unit tests in their local environment before committing the source code. Parallel software deployment environments don’t require cloud services, but they are much easier to set up when infrastructure is delivered instantly as a service. Cloud services and CD automation simplify the task to create and manage redundant environments for production, beta and developer code. New releases nondisruptively roll into production after a suitable testing cycle with the help of parallel setups.

DevOps Maturity is described as a model that determines an organization’s standing in DevOps journey along with deciding what more to be accomplished to achieve the desired results. Solutions like Containerization can also help to some extent in addressing issues continuously by limiting the vulnerable resources. The beginning of change mindset focused on agility in Dev and initial automation in Ops, with emphasis on collaboration.

Change does not happen overnight Embracing Continuous Deployment is a behaviroual shift. The team should move away from large deployments to smaller shorter release cycles. This also means establishing a sturdy safety net to catch failures at each step. This step ensure that you not only have tested your integrations continuously but are also deploying to various environments as frequently as possible.

What to Measure in a DevOps Maturity Model?

1) DevOps Maturity for Application – Determines DevOps maturity by the ease in code movement from Development to Production phase. Achieving this requires having builds, tests, code coverage, security scans and monitoring as automated components of the deployment pipeline. At this advanced level, teams also tackle harder deployment problems, such as multi-tier applications in which several components must deploy together, but are on different release cycles.

In reality, most teams don’t recognize the steps that led them from one level to another. More likely is that some series of changes pushes them to a new level and they only recognize the transition in hindsight. Immature teams will approach this process by trying to make a dozen changes at once. More often than not, they find that this means they fall flat on their faces. A team at this level should look at each facet of DevOps maturity and seek to improve incrementally. The best place to start is to recognize the team’s strengths and weaknesses as it pertains to continuous improvement.

We specifically omit certain items such as microservices since you can achieve CD without using microservices. GitOps has emerged as a key technology in the cloud native computing space over the last few years. Research into delivery velocity has shown that speeding up software delivery is closely correlated with business success. GitOps is an approach for building incredibly robust and repeatable continuous delivery pipelines. A maturity model describes milestones on the path of improvement for a particular type of process.

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