Dzone Guide To Dev Ops Volume IV

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DEAR READE R ,

TABLE OF CONTE NTS

Ever since the publication of Continuous Delivery and The Phoenix

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
BY MATT WERNER

KEY RESEARCH FINDINGS
BY G. RYAN SPAIN

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY ANTI-PATTERNS
BY MANUEL PAIS AND MATTHEW SKELTON

CHECKLIST: KEY FUNCTIONALITIES OF CI TOOLS
BY MANUEL MOREJON

9 BENEFITS OF CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
BY JOB VAN DER VOORT

benefits of Continuous Delivery have really taken root in the

INFOGRAPHIC: HOW TO AVOID DEAD-END DELIVERY

employees and managers of today’s business. Our audience

BETTER CODE FOR BETTER REQUIREMENTS
BY ALEX MARTINS

WHY MICROSERVICES SHOULD BE EVENT DRIVEN
BY CHRISTIAN POSTA

Project, there’s been a noticeable surge of hype around DevOps
in the development world, prompting many to automate their
deployments and improve collaboration between development and
operations. Since then, startups offering a new automation, pipeline,
communication, or monitoring tool have risen, fallen, been bought
out, or become juggernauts in a very competitive field, all while
educating developers on the benefits of Continuous Delivery and
introducing a whole language’s worth of jargon to the world.
As we take our first steps into 2017, we can see that, finally, the

has reported that more projects have implemented Continuous
Delivery, more organizations have dedicated DevOps teams,
and barriers to adopting these practices are being overcome. It’s
evident that we’re moving to a more clear sense of understanding
around DevOps.
However, the understanding around how to use technology
to reach these goals is not quite there. For example, our
analysis found that teams using container technology, such as
Docker, experienced a 20% faster mean time to recovery than

26 EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS ON THE STATE OF DEVOPS
BY TOM SMITH
30 BRANCHING CONSIDERED HARMFUL! (FOR C.I.)
BY ANDREW PHILLIPS
34 MICROSERVICES AND DOCKER AT SCALE
BY ANDERS WALLGREN

teams that do not. Yet only 25% of DZone members are using

containers, while another 25% are still evaluating the technology.

40 WHAT THE MILITARY TAUGHT ME ABOUT DEVOPS
BY CHRIS SHORT

Microservices in particular have started coming into their own.
The benefits of modular architecture to quickly push or roll back
changes to an application are in clear alignment with Continuous
Delivery, and audience members using microservices recover from
failure after 7 hours on average instead of 29 for those who don’t.
We can see a thirst for specific knowledge and case studies
across over two dozen planned DevOps Days in 2017, the DevOps
Enterprise Summit (organized by Phoenix Project author Gene

DIVING DEEPER INTO DEVOPS

44 DEVOPS SOLUTIONS DIRECTORY
48 GLOSSARY
PRODUCTION
CHRIS SMITH
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION

ANDRE POWELL
SR. PRODUCTION COORDINATOR

Kim), future Velocity conferences from O’Reilly, product-specific

G. RYAN SPAIN

conferences, and of course from DZone readers like you who visit

PRODUCTION PUBLICATIONS EDITOR

our DevOps zone every day.

ASHLEY SLATE
DESIGN DIRECTOR

Of course, understanding is only the first step, but actually
implementing Continuous Delivery across the entire enterprise
is another undertaking altogether, and we’ve worked to address
these issues in DZone’s Guide to DevOps: Continuous Delivery and
Automation, from the benefits of automation, to the pitfalls of
delayed branch merges, and the folly of “one-stop-shop” DevOps

MARKETING
KELLET ATKINSON
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING

LAUREN CURATOLA

EDITORIAL
CAITLIN CANDELMO

BUSINESS
RICK ROSS

DIRECTOR OF CONTENT +
COMMUNITY

CEO

MATT WERNER

PRESIDENT & CTO

CONTENT + COMMUNITY MANAGER

JESSE DAVIS

MICHAEL THARRINGTON
CONTENT + COMMUNITY MANAGER

MIKE GATES
CONTENT COORDINATOR

SARAH DAVIS
CONTENT COORDINATOR

TOM SMITH
RESEARCH ANALYST

MARKETING SPECIALIST

EVP & COO

MATT O’BRIAN

DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS
DEVELOPMENT
sales@dzone.com

ALEX CRAFTS
DIRECTOR OF MAJOR ACCOUNTS

JIM HOWARD
SR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE

JIM DYER
ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE

KRISTEN PAGÀN

ANDREW BARKER

solutions. Most will agree that the technology you use is not

MARKETING SPECIALIST

ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE

as important as the company culture or processes to facilitate

NATALIE IANNELLO

DevOps, but using that technology incorrectly will severely limit

MARKETING SPECIALIST

CHRIS BRUMFIELD
ACCOUNT MANAGER

ANA JONES

your efforts.

ACCOUNT MANAGER

So while most of us understand what Continuous Delivery is, and
what the benefits are, there is still a lot of work to do to get DevOps
working for the entire enterprise. Let’s get started.

BY MATT WERNER
CONTENT AND COMMUNITY MANAGER
RESEARCH@DZONE.COM

MATT SCHMIDT

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Executive
Summary

DevOps teams can be a step in the right direction, some experts
feel that the existence of a “DevOps team” is not the same as
practicing DevOps. In their quest to achieve Continuous Delivery,
organizations and teams should continue to automate whatever
processes they can.

TECHNOLOGY MATTERS FOR RECOVERY RATES
DATA

Organizations that use push-button or automated

deployments recover from failure twice as fast on average,
BY M AT T W E R N E R
C O N T E N T A N D C O M M U N I T Y M A N AG E R , DZO N E

compared to organizations that do not have such tools (12 hours
vs 24). Container users found that, on average, it took 20% less
time to recover than organizations that do not use containers.

Ever since DevOps became a permanent topic of
discussion in the world of software development,
there’s been a push from thought leaders, developers,

Those who have adopted microservices architectures for their
applications have a 7-hour Mean Time to Recover (MTTR),
compared to a 29-hour MTTR for those who don’t.
IMPLICATIONS

Continuous Delivery may not always be about

and businesses to adopt the tools and methodologies to

tooling, but it is clear that tools help achieve the goals of

achieving Continuous Delivery. The benefits are obvious:

CD. Modular, scalable technology, in addition to automated

with increased collaboration between development and

deployments, are key to reducing application downtime. In

operations teams, automated testing and deployments,

particular, the data suggests there is substance to the well-

and a supportive culture, bottlenecks can be eliminated,
code changes can be deployed faster, and applications

known hype around container technology, such as Docker,
and microservices architectures. As mentioned in the
“recommendations” in the previous sections, automation is

can recover from downtime much quicker. This year, it

incredibly important to quickly push changes to production and

seems that understanding around the processes, and

to get applications back online as soon as possible.

benfits is starting to make a substantial difference in
organizations and their employees, compared to previous

RECOMMENDATIONS If your organization or team can implement

microservices or containers into a new or existing application,

years. For DZone’s 2017 Guide to DevOps: Continuous Delivery

the data suggest that it’s worth it to give them a try. MTTR is a

and Automation, we surveyed almost 500 DZone members

very important metric to track and decrease, as large-scale, long-

about how their organizations have adopted DevOps, what

term failures will only produce angry users, and ultimately less

their pain points are, what tools they use, and how they’ve
finally made real headway to implementing Continuous
Delivery throughout their organizations.

PROGRESS IS BEING MADE TO ACHIEVE CONTINUOUS
DELIVERY

revenue for your organization.

TEARING DOWN THE WALLS
DATA

Compared to last year’s list of barriers to adopting

Continuous Delivery, survey respondents noted there were
significantly fewer blockers. In particular, 7% fewer DZone
members reported that there was no support from management,

DATA 41% of survey respondents reported that their organization

and 5% fewer respondents believed that engineers did not possess

had a DevOps team, compared to 34% in 2016. Between 2017 and

the skills to implement Continuous Delivery. All other barriers

2016, there was a 9% increase in those who felt they had adopted

decreased 2-4% between last year and this year.

CD for some projects, while respondents who felt Continuous
Delivery was a focus of their organization increased by 8%.

IMPLICATIONS There seems to have been a major shift in company

culture, and while management is still identified as the greatest

IMPLICATIONS Based on the growth in those who are doing

blocker to adopting DevOps, more managers have learned about the

continuous delivery for some projects, or have made it a focus

benefits of CD and have encouraged their teams to pursue it. This

for their team, it’s clear that more developers and managers

can also be reflected in the increase in DevOps adoption for some

have been able to at least start their journey towards Continuous

projects. In addition, with all the open source tools available, such as

Delivery. There’s also been an increase in education around

Jenkins, and wealth of knowledge on the topic available online, more

what constitutes Continuous Delivery. These huge gains reflect

developers are learning the right skills.

organizations who recognize they haven’t fully implemented
Continuous Delivery yet, which means they understand what full

RECOMMENDATIONS Developers and managers who understand

Continuous Delivery means across the whole organization.

the benefits of DevOps need to educate both their managers
and employees on the economic and engineering benefits of

RECOMMENDATIONS For all the progress in partially adopting

Continuous Delivery. Continuous Delivery needs a supportive

Continuous Delivery, there still seems to be a lack of knowledge

culture to thrive in, and those supportive cultures come from

around Mean Time to Recovery and Mean Time Between Failures,

a mix of enthusiasm from both management and employees,

so developers need to communicate more with their ops teams to

which helps to create an understanding of shared goals. See

figure out how long their services are down, then come together

our infographic on page 16 for more information on how these

and figure out a solution to the problem. While the increase in

barriers, and others, can block DevOps adoption.

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TIME TO FACE THE STRANGE

Key
Research
Findings
BY G . R YA N S PA I N
P R O D U C T I O N C O O R D I N ATO R , DZO N E

497 respondents completed our 2017 Continuous Delivery
survey. The demographics of the respondents include:
• 19% of respondents work at organizations with

over 10,000 employees; 20% at organizations
between 1,000 and 10,000 employees; and 26% at
organizations between 100 and 1,000 employees.
• 45% of respondents work for organizations

headquartered in Europe, and 30% for organizations
based in the US.
• On average, respondents had 15 years of experience

as IT professionals; 27% had 20 years or more of
experience.
• 42% of respondents identified as developers/

engineers, and 27% identified as developer team leads.
• 82% of respondents work at companies using the Java

ecosystem, and 70% at companies using client-side
JavaScript.

HAS YOUR ORGANIZATION MOVED TOWARDS A MICROSERVICE
ARCHITECTURE?

DevOps has had some steady growth over the past year, as
more and more developers and organizations work towards
automation and cross-departmental collaboration. 41% of
respondents said their organization has a dedicated DevOps
team, up 7% over last year’s statistic (which had not changed
from the year before). Performance issue detection in the
software delivery process increased 5% year over year, while
automated performance testing increased 6% and automated
feature validation increased 4%. The number of respondents
who said they believe their organization has achieved
Continuous Delivery “for some projects” increased 9%
from 2016, and there was an 8% swing in respondents who
said that CD is a focus for their organization. Microservice
architectures are used 7% more compared to last year, and
container adoption is up 8%. The use of version control tools
reported in QA and Production have increased 15% and 18%
respectively, and the use of CI tools in those departments
increased 17% and 13%.
Despite this growth, there are some areas of stagnation in
CD results. From 2016, there was no statistically significant
change in respondents’ estimate of their mean time to
recovery (between hours and days) or mean time between
failures (between hours, days, and months). Most CD pipeline
pain points also remained the same from last year, with the
exception of automated testing, which dropped 7% as a pain
point, and the deployment process and regression testing,
which each dropped 4%.

SIZE MATTERS
With regards to having Continuous Delivery implemented
in an organization, and having Continuous Delivery
implementation be a focus for an organization, company size
plays a sizable role. Respondents’ belief that their company
has achieved Continuous Delivery trends upwards as the size
of their organizations increase. 51% of respondents working
at companies under 100 employees think their company
has either fully or partially achieved Continuous Delivery,
versus 60% of respondents who work at companies larger

HAVE YOU OR YOUR ORGANIZATION ADOPTED CONTAINER
TECHNOLOGY (E.G. DOCKER)

NO, AND NO PLANS
TO DO SO

27%

29%

YES, FOR THE WHOLE
BUSINESS

25%

STILL EVALUATING

YES, FOR SELECT
APPLICATIONS

13%
26%

CURRENTLY
TRANSITIONING

YES

24%

26%

NO, BUT CONSIDERING
DOING SO

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NO, BUT CONSIDERING
DOING SO
NO, AND NO PLANS
TO DO SO

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than 10,000 employees. And only 41% of respondents working
at sub-100 employee organizations say that CD is a focus for
their company, 15% less than those who work at companies
between 100 and 9,999 employees and 30% less than those
who work at 10,000+ organizations.
This goes hand-in-hand with larger companies’ ability, and
likely need, to have dedicated DevOps teams. Only about one
in four respondents (27%) at an organization with fewer than
100 employees said their company had a dedicated DevOps
team, compared to almost half (45%) of respondents between
100 and 9,999 employees and 62% over 10,000.

STOP... RECOVERY TIME
Overall, respondents’ estimated an average mean time to
recovery of just under 19 hours, with estimates ranging from
just minutes to 40 days, but with most estimates falling
somewhere between 2 and 24 hours. Several factors come
into play here, which can drastically change the mean-timeto-recovery estimates. Respondents whose organizations
have push-button/automated deployment estimated
recoveries happen twice as fast as organizations that don’t
(12 hours versus 24 hours). Those respondents using or
evaluating container technologies estimated about 20% less
time to recover than non-container users (17 hours versus 21
hours). Microservice usage greatly affected these estimates.
Respondents who said their organization has not moved to
microservice architectures estimated, on average, a 29hour mean time to recovery; respondents at organizations
currently transitioning estimated 12 hours; and respondents

at organizations using microservices for some or all of their
applications estimated a 7 hour mean time to recovery.

BRING THE PAIN POINTS
We asked our survey-takers who said they believed their
organization had implemented Continuous Delivery in
some capacity what their biggest pain points were in the
CD pipeline, and likewise asked those respondents who
did not think their organization had achieved CD status
what they thought were the main barriers to adopting CD.
As mentioned earlier, most pain points appeared to be
just as painful this year as they were last year. The most
common pain points were environment config and setup
(56%), coordination of team members and resources (34%),
and regression testing (32%). Most other pain points were
experienced by roughly a quarter of respondents, with
the exceptions of build and compile (8%) and supply chain
management (7%).
Regarding barriers to adoption, this year’s respondents
again answered similarly to last year’s results, though all
barriers did drop somewhat. The biggest changes here were
“no support from management,” which dropped 7% from
last year, and “Engineers/Ops don’t have the right skill sets,”
which dropped 5%. All others dropped between 2 and 4
percent from last year. So, while progress is being made to
make CD easier to adopt and manage, there is still certainly
plenty of room for improvement.

WHAT ARE YOUR BIGGEST PAIN POINTS IN THE CONTINUOUS
DELIVERY PIPELINE?

WHAT ARE YOUR MAIN BARRIERS TO ADOPTING CONTINUOUS
DELIVERY?

56
50

53
47

32 31

29 29

30
25

26
15

7
3

Other

Constrained by regulations
or legal requirements

Don’t have the best release
or CI technology

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

Integrating automation
technologies

Not enough budget

No support from management

Engineers/Ops don’t have the
right skill sets

Lack of time

Corporate Culture - not enough
collaboration/DevOps practices

Other

Supply Chain Management

Build and Compile

Delivery and Rollout

Requirements Issues

Software Change Management
(SCM)

Performance Testing

Automated Testing

Deployment Process

User Acceptance Testing

Regression Testing

Coordination of team members
and resources

Environment configuration and
set-up

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QUICK VIEW
01 Single vendor “DevOps one-stop shop”
solutions trade ownership of your
toolchain for ease of setup and slow you
down over time.

Continuous Delivery
Anti-Patterns

02 Cost of lack of evolvability is often
underplayed, while cost of individual
tool integration is overrated.
03 Out-of-the-box tools also fail. A
combination of poor error messages
and lack of access to logs leads to
massive waste of time.
04 Tools that equal a stage to an
environment deployment miss out on
the real power of deployment pipelines.
05 Out-of-the-box solutions propagate
vendors’ misunderstandings of
principles and practices.

BY MANUEL PAIS AND MATTHEW SKELTON
SKELTON THATCHER CONSULTING

An anti-pattern is typically a behavior that
hinders or at least negatively influences a target
objective. There are many anti-patterns for
Continuous Delivery documented by people like
Jez Humble, Steve Smith, and ourselves.

Tooling integration cost is not zero, but it’s negligible when
compared to the potential cost of not integrating. One-stop
solutions might embed erroneous concepts. Any tool might.
The problem is that the former will propagate them across
the entire lifecycle.
ONE-STOP SHOP SOLUTION

Some CD anti-patterns arise not from an existing behavior,
but by trying to actually implement the practices without
BUILD

understanding their goals first. That is especially frequent

PACKAGE

DEPLOY

when adopting integrated tools that are supposed to support
a full set of CD practices out-of-the-box. The idea that you
can “just plug in a deployment pipeline” and get the benefits

Anti-pattern: Single tool without standard APIs, or only for some components.

of CD is a common anti-pattern.
In the following sections we will look into some of these
“unintentional” and often hard-to-notice anti-patterns
that might emerge when adopting a “DevOps one-stop
shop” solution.

Instead, single-purpose, focused tools with a well-defined
API help reduce the blast radius of bad practices. And you can
swap them easily when they don’t match your requirements
anymore. A flexible toolchain standardizes practices, not
tools. It supports certain capabilities, which are easy to locate
and expand on, replacing particular components (tools) when

ANTI-PATTERN #1:
AVOIDING TOOL INTEGRATION LIKE THE PLAGUE

required.

There is a prevalent notion, especially in larger enterprises,

ORCHESTRATE
PIPELINE

that integrating disparate tools is extremely expensive. That
you’ll be locked for eternity maintaining glue code with high
technical debt. That might have been true in the 2000s, but
surely not today.
As long as you are integrating tools with clear and

API

BUILD

PACKAGE

DEPLOY

standard APIs, the orchestration code can be minimal and
understandable by anyone familiar with API development
(which all developers should be in 2017!).

Pattern: Single-purpose tools with clear APIs/boundaries that can be replaced
more easily.

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Another gain with individual tools: you can actually expect an

support to get back to you (if you hit the jackpot with a

answer from the vendor when you ask for a feature, since they

technical issue deep in the tool’s gut, good luck waiting

have a reduced feature set and faster change cycles. A vendor

for the support-to-engineering return trip time). That time

of a one-stop solution has a lot more requests in its backlog.

alone is an order of magnitude higher than any individual

Chances are, if you’re not a major client, your requests will get

tool integration time you’d have spent.

buried for months or even years.

ANTI-PATTERN #3:
ENVIRONMENT-DRIVEN PIPELINES

“The idea that you can ‘just
plug in a deployment pipeline’
and get the benefits of CD is a
common anti-pattern.”

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Tools that assume your
pipeline is nothing but a sequence of environments where
you deploy your system and run some tests.
A pipeline stage represents an activity in the delivery chain.
It might require:

• One environment: typical for acceptance tests
• Zero environments: typical for manual checks/analysis
or approval requests

• Multiple environments: typical for performance tests
ANTI-PATTERN #2:
ERROR HANDLING & LOGGING BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Thus pipeline stages should not be tightly coupled to

Another hidden time-consuming anti-pattern in one-

to pipelines that contemplate only automatable activities,

stop solutions derives from generic error messages or

hiding other (often non-technical) activities that are part

inaccessible logging. This tends to be especially painful

of delivery as well. In turn, this leads to lack of visibility on

with SaaS solutions.

(real) bottlenecks and local optimization (technical steps)

environments. Assuming only the first option above leads

instead of global (cycle time).
Unfortunately our industry is still plagued with the
“abstraction everywhere bias”: a tendency to favor generic
error messages (“VM could not be started” or “Deployment
failed”) instead of spelling out what was the expected input or

Int-Tests-Env

Acceptance-QA-Env

Perf-Instance1-Env

Perf-Instance2-Env

Release-42

13 hours ago

output and the difference to the actual result. Now add to the
mix inaccessible logs for those failed operations, a common
situation in one-stop solutions that provide only UI access to

Anti-pattern: Pipeline stages = Environment deploys

certain features or only let you access logs via queries.
The problem is these tools assume they have all the use
trigger new build

Integration

Acceptance

for any tool, or any software in fact. We will always need

https://github.com/S...

cases and all the failure scenarios covered. That is untrue

...

access to information to troubleshoot issues. The more

Production
No instance of this
pipeline has run for any of
the direct upstream
dependency revision

information we have, the more likely we can correlate
Performance

events and find the causes.

No instance of this
pipeline has run for any of
the direct upstream
dependency revision

Security
No instance of this
pipeline has run for any of
the direct upstream
dependency revision

User_Acceptance
No instance of this
pipeline has run for any of
the direct upstream
dependency revision

Staging
No instance of this
pipeline has run for any of
the direct upstream
dependency revision

Pattern: Pipeline stages represent activities, which might require 0 to many
environments.

Pattern: Centralizing logs from individual tools and correlating messages.

ANTI-PATTERN #4
FLEXING IS FOR FITNESS, NOT FOR PRINCIPLES

Think of all the time spent deciphering error messages,

Adopting core Continuous Delivery principles is hard and

trying to guess what went wrong, or waiting for a vendor’s

often requires mental and cultural shifts. Without them the

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underlying practices become ceremonies, instead of actual
improvements in delivery. Flexibility is fine for the gym, but
not for core principles required for a (often radical) new way
of working.
If the tools supporting the practices do not align with
the principles, they end up unintentionally undermining
the whole endeavor. In contrast, working with a set of
single-purpose tools helps identify and address erroneous
assumptions by any one tool.
Below are a couple of examples of misalignment between
implementation and principles that we’ve seen in some outof-the-box integrated tools.
STATUS: ???

Anti-pattern: Using common terminology to represent something
totally unrelated.

A pipeline status should be binary. Red or green. Not orange.
Not grey. Not blue. Recurring ambiguities in status inevitably

Another example are “release definitions” instead of

lead to disengagement by development teams. This is the

“pipeline definitions” (the image above is a release definition

CD equivalent to warnings at compilation time. If the first

configuration). Legacy terminology leads to legacy behaviors,

warnings are ignored by developer A, then developer B and

thinking of releases and work batches instead of pipelines

developer C will ignore them as well. Soon everyone just

and frequent delivery of small, low-risk changes in

assumes having 372 warnings is ok.

production.

Having an uncontested pipeline status is a prerequisite to

This might seem like just nitpicking, but the accumulation

the Continuous Delivery principle of “stopping the line”

of all these misunderstandings leads to unknowingly

when a pipeline fails (then either fix it quickly or revert the

misinformed organizations and teams.

changes that broke it). Interestingly, this is also a prerequisite to get rid of those nasty compilation warnings (try making the pipeline go red if there are compilation warnings).

SUMMARY
We want to go faster and faster delivering products. To do so
we should also be able to go faster and faster in adapting our
pipeline to support that goal.
But one-stop tooling solutions often bring along several antipatterns that slow us down or misguide us, as explored in
this article.
We’re not advocating for always integrating your own tool
chains. Your organization might have good reasons to go for a
one-stop solution in terms of DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

Anti-pattern: Non-binary status: once upon a time there was a green build...

We just recommend being extremely conscious of the trade-off
you’re making. And we hope the anti-patterns highlighted in
this article help guide some of that thinking process.

TERMINOLOGY FAIL

Another plague in our industry is the proliferation of
terminology. We have enough confusion as it is and quite
frankly one-stop tool vendors are not helping. They, above
all, should strive to align on common terminology, as they
are informing their clients on the entire lifecycle. So it better

M A N UE L PA I S is a people-friendly technologist at
@SkeltonThatcher. He’s a Continuous Delivery and DevOps
advocate, with a diverse background as developer, build manager
and QA lead. Also @InfoQ DevOps lead editor, co-organizer of
@DevOpsLisbon meetup.

be correct. This is clearly complicated as those vendors have
many different teams working on the integrated tools. But it
is needed.
One puzzling example we have come across of terminology
failures is calling a pipeline trigger from a successful build a
“continuous deployment.”

M AT T HE W S K E LTON has been building, deploying, and
operating commercial software systems since 1998. Co- founder
and Principal Consultant at Skelton Thatcher Consulting, he
specializes in helping organizations to adopt and sustain good
practices for building and operating software systems: Continuous
Delivery, DevOps, aspects of ITIL, and software operability.

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DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

Key
Functionalities
of CI Tools

infrastructure tools selection. The systems selected

3. CONCOURSE CI

should have short deployment cycles in order to

Concourse is a Continuous Integration tool created

guarantee quick bug fixes and new features from

with the pipeline as a first-class citizen. The system

the team.

shows us a new way to manage jobs in the server.

6. INTEGRATION WITH THIRD-PARTY
RESOURCES
Allowing the integration between the system and
external services is vital to the organization. The
system itself doesn’t need to have all functionalities,

BY MANUEL MOREJON

but it must have an architecture to allow increased
benefit through third-party resources. Allowing

DevOps teams should strive to create

support from the community has been demonstrated

and support workflows that best fit the

to be crucial in the improvement of the system.

entire team. During workflow creation, it is
important to evaluate your team’s needs and
think ahead when selecting a continuous
integration tool. Sometimes, selecting a

Desirable Traits of
Local CI Tools
Identifying the best tools for your organization must

describe jobs and tasks.
In Concourse, every process runs inside a container.
Concourse workers can be installed cross-platform
and they are responsible for running the jobs
described in the YAML format inside containers.
Concourse CI update its products each month.

Advantages of Using
Local CI Tools
The advantages obtained when using a local CI
system include:

local CI solution is a necessary or a political

start from examining the needs of your development

requirement in teams or enterprises, so the

group. Below are some desirable traits to keep in

1. THE CODE INTEGRATION IS CONSTANT

installation and configuration of the system

mind when making your selection:

The development group is not as likely to be affected

must be set up within the organization’s own

1. FREE UNLIMITED USERS

by any unplanned interruptions during integration of

infrastructure. There are many CI systems

Allowing multiple users access to the systems and

that offer the ability to tie directly to local

the use of role-based management for users.

infrastructure, but not all do — for this

2. FREE UNLIMITED PROJECTS AND BUILDS

checklist, we’ll focus on the ones that do.

Allowing management of multiple projects and

Updates sometimes involve making adjustments to

unlimited execution of builds.

project settings. An unwanted update may cause

3. FREE UNLIMITED AGENTS
Allowing build executions on multiple machines.
1. PIPELINE
Continuous Integration systems should have an
interface showing the current process state and all
task transitions during the deployment process. These
systems should manage tasks in both the sequential
and parallel. They also should give the option for the
DevOps team to handle manual actions in order to
specify when they need something to be deployed.
2. BUILD AS CODE
Writing the workflow in a file permit executes the same

Local CI Tools Analyzed

the code as they might if using an outsourced cloudhosted system.
2. SYSTEM UPDATES ARE CONTROLLED

errors in code integration—stay in control of updates
by using a local tool.
3. GREATER PRIVACY OF WORK GROUP
PRODUCTS
Although there are security and privacy policies when

Each one of the tools listed here includes the

using paid cloud services, it is always best to leave

features mentioned above.

the code at home behind a firewall.

1. GITLAB CE

This file is used to describe all tasks in a single file

Disadvantages of Using
Local CI Tools

with the YAML format.

The tools analyzed in this article can be acquired

GitLab CI is a part of GitLab that allows you to
manage jobs with tasks through the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

without any cost, but this does not mean that the

workflow every time you need it. This method is the
philosophy of “write once and run forever,” but applied

GitLab CI allows for the use of Docker to build and

installation and the maintenance are totally free for

to the Continuous Integration process. Now, you don’t

deploy projects, and they offer a Private Docker

the development team. The team must invest in:

have to remember or record each step you do during

Registry to store your own images. GitLab Runner

the system configuration. The human error is reduced

can be installed cross-platform and is responsible

to zero. These files are included in a version control

for running jobs on external machines. GitLab CE

system and all changes can be tracked over time.

updates its products the 22nd of every month.

3. WORK WITH CONTAINERS

2. JENKINS

Containers have proven to be of great importance
in system development. Docker is a primary tool in
the development process. Continuous Integration
systems have been adding functionalities to manage
containers and images as part of daily routines.
4. MULTI-PLATFORM
You should be able to execute constructions in Unix,

Jenkins uses the Pipeline Plugin to manage and
describe the deployment process. This plugin uses

1. HARDWARE INFRASTRUCTURE
Physical or virtual machines with medium or
high profile.
2. SPECIALISTS IN THE AREA
Engineers and Specialists with the correct
knowledge.

a Jenkinsfile to register all steps that should be
executed by the Pipeline Plugin. Jenkins also has the
Blue Ocean Plugin to improve user experience during

MANUEL MOREJON is a Master in

the use of the Pipeline Plugin.

Applied Software, a DevOps Engineer, and
a Configuration Manager. Manuel has both

The Docker Plugin allows Jenkins users to manage

the technical and communication skills

develop from any operating system.

topics related to containers and images. Jenkins uses

to help teams improve their workflows and reduce

node philosophy to run jobs on external machines.

deployment times, the goal always being to maximize

5. ACTIVE SUPPORT

These machines can have different operating systems,

productivity by minimizing errors. Enthusiastic about

Concepts like continuous integration and continuous

allowing them to run cross-platform functionalities.

teaching and sharing knowledge with the community,

deployment should be taken into account during the

Jenkins updates its products each month.

Manuel writes at mmorejon.github.io/en/blog.

Windows, and Mac OS X, allowing your team to

Concourse uses files with the YAML format to

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

.
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.
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t
a
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Accele
.
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e
!
t
E
s
E
a
F
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F
Delive

ElectricFlow: The Most Advanced
DevOps Release Automation Solution
• Plug-in all point-tools, stacks and processes to
orchestrate pipelines from check-in to Production
• Deploy to any cloud or container environment
without heavy scripting or learning new APIs
• Powerful DSL, CLI and APIs provide
programmatic access to all UI functionality

USE IT FREE: electric-cloud.com/electricflow

SPONSORED OPINION

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

The Most Advanced
DevOps Release
Automation Solution

With ElectricFlow, enterprises can model their application
delivery pipelines, to normalize their “Pathways to
Production” as much as possible to allow faster feedback
loops and reusability across the organization, while
supporting the specific needs of different teams or variants
of the application. The ability to have consistent build, test,
and deployment processes that everyone benefits from is the
“Holy Grail” for enterprises as they take the next steps in their
DevOps adoption towards scaling DevOps in the organization.

For over a decade, Electric Cloud has been helping
organizations automate and accelerate their software
delivery. ElectricFlow, the company’s end-to-end DevOps
Release Automation platform, has recently been named
the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Application
Release Automation—getting the highest scores for both
vision and execution.

By standardizing on ElectricFlow to manage their tools and
processes across the organization, customers eliminate
configuration drift, bottlenecks in the pipeline, and save
on operational cost and management overhead. The tight
integration between the various processes and tools
eliminates manual handoffs or silos of automation to speed

ElectricFlow orchestrates and automates the entire software

up cycle times, provide better product quality, and improve

delivery pipeline. By allowing customers to plug in all the

resource utilization.

point-tools, environments, and processes involved in their
delivery process, ElectricFlow enables organizations to
orchestrate the end-to-end pipeline and achieve visibility,

WRITTEN BY ANDERS WALLGREN

compliance, and control over the entire release process.

CTO, ELECTRIC CLOUD, INC.

ElectricFlow

By Electric Cloud

Accelerate Dev. Simplify Ops. Deliver Faster.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE

STRENGTHS

DevOps Release
Automation

Every 60 days

No, but we offer a free
community edition

• Automating and accelerating software delivery

since 2002
• Broadly recognized by leading analyst as DevOps

Release Automation Leader

CASE STUDY
Companies like E-Trade, HPE, Gap, and Huawei trust Electric
Cloud with their DevOps Release Automation for faster releases,

• Single, scalable DevOps Release Automation platform

that shrinks cycle times

fewer process errors, better visibility, and better software quality.
For Huawei, ElectricFlow is part of a comprehensive solution,
supporting more than 2000 releases per year, 50K compile &
builds per day, 100 million test cases run per day including more
than 30 million LOC for a very complex product. They completed
more than 480K code reviews/analyses per year and more than

• Automate and orchestrate your entire end-to-end

pipeline—plug in all your tools, stacks & processes
• Deploy to any cloud/container environment without

heavy scripting or learning new APIs

170K system integration tests per year. E-Trade uses ElectricFlow
for faster build, test, and deploy cycles for their website, mobile

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS

clients, trading engine, and settling systems. Since using

• E-TRADE

• GE

• Intel

• Gap

• HPE

• Lockheed Martin

ElectricFlow, they’ve experienced 12x faster delivery.

BLOG electric-cloud.com/blog

TWITTER @electriccloud

WEBSITE electric-cloud.com

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QUICK VIEW

9 Benefits of
Continuous Integration:

Continuous Integration,
Continuous Deployment, and
Continuous Delivery together
enable a team to safely build,
test, and deploy code.

Automating testing through
Continuous Integration is a
way to increase code quality.

9 benefits of Continuous
Integration are listed,
explained, and help shed
light on why teams should
adopt these practices.

Why Modern Development Teams Should
Automate Testing
BY JOB VAN DER VOORT
VP OF PRODUCT AT GITLAB

Across almost every industry, the best

they do not deploy to production, so this is considered

companies are increasingly becoming those

Continuous Integration only.

who make great software. As a result,

Continuous Delivery is a software engineering approach

software development teams are transforming

in which continuous integration, automated testing, and

their software operations to optimize for

automated deployment capabilities allow software to be
developed and deployed rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly

efficiency, quality, and reliability. Continuous

with minimal human intervention. Still, the deployment to

Integration, Continuous Deployment, and

production is defined strategically and triggered manually.

Continuous Delivery are increasingly popular

Mozilla is a good example of an organization using

topics among modern development teams.

Continuous Delivery. Mozilla says that for many of their

Together they enable a team to safely build,
test, and deploy their code. These modern
development practices help teams release
quality code faster and continuously.

web projects “once a code change lands on a master
branch it is shepherded to production with little-to-no
human intervention.”
Continuous Deployment is a software development
practice in which every code change goes through the
entire pipeline and is put into production automatically,

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION, DELIVERY, AND
DEPLOYMENT DEFINED

resulting in many production deployments every day. It

Continuous Integration is a software development

process is fully automated; there’s no human intervention

practice in which you build and test software every time a

at all.

developer pushes code to the application.

does everything that Continuous Delivery does, but the

Hubspot, Etsy, and Wealthfront all use continuous

For example, let’s say developers push code to improve

deployment to deploy multiple times a day. In 2013,

their software projects every day, multiple times per day.

Hubspot reported that they deploy 200-300 times day.

For every commit, they use a CI tool to test and build

People often assume that continuous deployment only

their software. The CI tool will run unit tests to make

works for web-based software companies, so I’d like to

sure their changes didn’t break any other parts of the

offer another example in a completely different industry:

software. Every push automatically triggers multiple

Tesla. Tesla Model S is using continuous deployment to

tests. Then if one fails it’s much easier to identify where

ship updates to the firmware on a regular basis. These

the error is and start working to fix it. But for this team,

changes don’t simply change the dashboard UI or offer

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new ways to change console settings in your car, they
improve key elements of the car, like acceleration and
suspension. Tesla proves that continuous delivery can
work for any team committed to the practice.

5. BUILD STUFF NOW

All your tests are green and the coverage is good, but you
don’t handle code that needs to be deployed? No worries!
CI servers can also trigger build and compilation processes
that will take care of your needs in no time. No more

9 BENEFITS OF CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
The benefits of Continuous Integration, Delivery, and
Deployment are clear. However, the process to building
the pipeline to do Continuous Delivery or Deployment
isn’t always easy. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
do it. We believe that modern development teams are
working their way up to Continuous Deployment. That’s
why we suggest getting started with automated testing
through Continuous Integration today. With automated
tests on each new commit, Continuous Integration is a
great way to increase code quality. Here are our top nine
reasons why we think every development team should be
doing Continuous Integration.

having to sit in front of your terminal waiting for the build
to finish, only to have it fail at the last second. You can run
any long-running processes as a part of your CI builds and
the CI system will notify you if anything goes wrong, even
restarting or triggering certain processes if needed.
6. BUILD STUFF FASTER

With parallel build support, you can split your tests and
build processes over different machines (VMs/containers),
so the total build time will be much shorter than if you
ran it locally. This also means you’ll consume fewer local
resources, so you can continue working on something else
while the builds run.

1. MANUAL TESTS ARE ONLY A SNAPSHOT
How many times have you heard a team member say “it
worked locally.” In their defense, it likely did work locally.
However, when they tested it locally they were testing on
a snapshot of your code base and by the time they pushed,
things changed. Continuous Integration tests your code
against the current state of your code base and always in
the same (production-like) environment, so you can spot
any integration challenges right away.
2. INCREASE YOUR CODE COVERAGE
Think your tests cover most of your code? Well think
again. A CI server can check your code for test coverage.
Now, every time you commit something new without any
tests, you will feel the shame that comes with having your
coverage percentage go down because of your changes.
Seeing code coverage increase over time is a motivator for
the team to write tests.
3. INCREASE VISIBILITY ACROSS THE TEAM
Continuous Integration inspires transparency and
accountability across your team. The results of your
tests should be displayed on your build pipeline. If a
build passes, that increases the confidence of the team.
If it fails, you can easily ask team members to help you
determine what may have gone wrong. Just like code
review, testing should be a transparent process amongst
team members.

7. NEVER SHIP BROKEN CODE

Using continuous integration means that all code is tested
and only merged when all tests pass. Therefore, it’s much
less likely that your master builds are broken and broken
code is shipped to production. In the unlikely event that
your master build is broken, let your CI system trigger a
warning to all developers: some companies install a little
warning light in the office that lights up if this happens!
8. DECREASE CODE REVIEW TIME

You can have your CI and Version Control System
communicate with each other and tell you when a merge
request is good to merge: the tests have passed and it
meets all requirements. In addition, even the difference in
code coverage can be reported right in the merge request.
This can dramatically reduce the time it takes to review a
merge request.
9. BUILD REPEATABLE PROCESSES

Today’s pace of innovation requires development
teams to deliver high-quality software faster than their
competition. Modern development teams are building
efficient software delivery engines by creating repeatable
processes that standardize development best practices.
With automated testing, your code is tested in the same
way for every change, so you can trust that every change
is tested before it goes to production.

4. DEPLOY YOUR CODE TO PRODUCTION
A CI system can automatically deploy your code to staging
or even production if all the tests within a specific branch
are green. This is what is formally known as Continuous
Deployment. Changes before being merged can be made
visible in a dynamic staging environment, and once they
are merged these can be deployed directly to a central
staging, pre-production, or production environment.

J OB VA N D E R VOOR T discovered his love for building
software while working in neuroscience and quickly left
academia for GitLab. As the VP of Product at GitLab, Job is
responsible for building software that helps anyone go faster
from idea to production. In his free time, Job likes to build apps, play
board and video games, and explore new tech.

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Automic, the leader in Business Automation, helps enterprises drive competitive advantage by automating their IT and
business systems - from on-premise to the Cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things. With offices worldwide, Automic
powers over 2,700 customers including Bosch, Netflix, eBay, AMC Theatres, Carphone Warehouse, ExxonMobil, Vodafone, Société Générale, NHS SBS, General Electric and Swisscom. More information can be found at www.automic.com.

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

SPONSORED OPINION

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

Automic is the largest global pure-play automation
solution provider. With a focus on customer

We help companies grow their business by

satisfaction, continuous innovation, dedicated specialized

taking away the stress of the every day so

teams and partnerships, we lead the business automation
scene. We help over 2,700 companies - from start-ups to

they can focus on innovation.

global brands - grow their business by taking away the
stress of the every day so they can focus on innovation.
differentiated product features that make the difference,
Automic has mastered the art of connecting islands
of automation. We have proven this over and over
again - significantly reducing complexity by orchestrating

but also our dedicated automation specialists located in
each region, as close as possible to our clients. We focus
on Business Automation.

business processes with the broadest range of
We have over 20 years of experience in this field.

integrations.

That’s how we do business - we empower business
We believe in building long lasting relationships with our

through automation.

customers and going the extra mile. To be our client’s
trusted partner requires interacting with clients on their

WRITTEN BY LUCAS CARLSON

most critical automation challenges. It’s not just our

Automic v12

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT (SVP) OF STRATEGY, AUTOMIC SOFTWARE

By Automic

Automic V12 is a unified suite of business automation products which drive agility across
Enterprise Operations and empower your DevOps initiatives.
CATEGORY
Release Automation /
Workload Automation /
Service Orchestration /
DevOps, AgileOps

NEW
RELEASES

OPEN
SOURCE

Bi-annually

Yes

STREAMLINING DEV AND OPS PRODUCTIVITY BY:
• Switching the development from a project to a product mode
(cross-project development teams based on capabilities rather than
assignment of individual developers to projects).

• Moving project managers from development micromanagement to focus
on major milestones and deliverables to the business.

• Enabling some project managers as product owners (project

CASE STUDY
Working closely with Automic, an international wholesaler
and retailer of jewelry transformed a department of project
managers, developers and operations, responsible for all of
the customer-facing websites, into a DevOps organization. As
a result, project delivery was completed with 90 percent fewer
delays, and first customer-facing releases of projects could be
delivered in less than half the time. The usability of its websites
increased significantly; resulting in more customer traffic,
longer average time spent on the sites and increased revenue.

management remained necessary).

• Providing developers with agile methodologies through initial training
plus ongoing coaching (six to 12 months).

• Providing ops with an agile methodology.
• Organizing both dev and ops into multi-skilled teams focused on
individual products rather than technologies.

• Aligning ops into delivery teams, initially part-time and later full-time.
• Giving delivery teams the end-to-end responsibility for their products,
including their operations.

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
• Bosch
• ExxonMobil
• Netflix

• Vodafone

• AMC Theatres

• NHS SBS

BLOG automic.com/blog

• General Electric

• Standardizing the technology stacks within teams (but not across them)
over time.

• Delivering projects into production (or alpha, beta) in slices (releases)
instead of just once to get early feedback and improve.

TWITTER @automic

WEBSITE automic.com

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

In this year's survey of DZone's audience, 48% of respondents believe they

headway in their adoption efforts. To learn more about them, we're going

have not adopted Continuous Delivery, and 38% believe they have adopted

to play a little game...

Continuous Delivery only for some projects. Just over half of respondents
(54%) are currently focused on implementing Continuous Delivery in their

Imagine you're a plucky young startup with everything to prove, or perhaps

companies, so what's keeping them from reaching that goal, and what's

part of a seasoned corporation that's been around the block and is ready for

keeping the other 46% from trying to implement it? Turns out, there are a

a transition to more modern methodologies. Can you achieve Continuous

lot of obstacles that can prevent developers or managers from making

Delivery without running into any of these barriers? A-maze us!

NO SUPPORT FROM
MANAGEMENT
While the benefits of Continuous
Delivery are well-documented, the
initial investment into tooling and training
can put a lot of managers off the concept. For
successful Continuous Delivery, it takes both management and
frontline developers to believe in the benefits and be
devoted to working towards them.

30%

LACK OF SKILL

45%

Jamie Zawinski once famously said,
"Linux is only free if your time has no
value." Unfortunately, in the Enterprise,
whether you go for an open source or
proprietary tool, implementing DevOps
tools and processes take a lot of time that
you may not have, especially if you have delivery
dates looming.

CORPORATE CULTURE
Company culture can be difficult to
establish, and even more difficult
to change. If a culture has built
silos that separate teams from each
other, it's going to be very difficult
to foster the collaboration, flexibility, and
speed that Continuous Delivery demands.

53%

LACK OF TIME

47%

INTEGRATING AUTOMATION
TECHNOLOGY
27%

Continuous Delivery is very difficult
without adopting several new tools,
and impossible without changing
processes. Learning all these new
technologies can be incredibly
difficult, especially if there's no prior
knowledge on your team.

The knowledge to put the pieces of your build pipeline
together may not exist in your organization, and even if it
does it could take a lot of work to integrate these tools,
especially if those tools are open source and you don't have
budget to spring for a proprietary product.

LACK OF BUDGET
27%

If your organization doesn't have time to
go the open source route, you'll need to
use proprietary solutions, which you may
not have the budget for, especially if
you're a startup without VC or time to
spare. No money, mo' problems.

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QUICK VIEW

Better Code for
Better Requirements

Code may be of the highest
quality, but if it’s not reflecting
what was specified in the
requirements, you may have
built perfectly useless code.

By preventing defects from
being written into the code,
quality is thus built into the
application from the onset.

The use of a CAD-like tool
in software engineering not
only accelerates the software
lifecycle, but also ensures
developers are building the
right things.

BY ALEX MARTINS
CTO/ADVISOR - CONTINUOUS QUALITY AT CA TECHNOLOGIES

Quality is a very hot topic in the DevOps and
Continuous Delivery era. “Quality with speed” is
the theme of the hour. But most development and
testing teams have different views on what quality
means to them.
Looking back at my days as a professional
developer, I remember being tasked to follow the
company coding style guide. This described the
design principles and the code convention all
the developers should follow so that we wrote
consistent code. Thus when a change request came
in, anyone could read the code and make the edits,
and we could minimize maintenance.
Then there were the weekly reviews where we would get together
with a peer and go through the code to ensure we understood it

So to keep improving their code in such a mature environment,
these teams use code quality tools to profile the code and
determine where to focus refactoring efforts first. This helps
them build things right. But no matter how good the code gets,
the user may still think the application sucks, simply because
they were not building the right things in the eyes of the user.
There is a difference between the two, and in my experience,
this is a huge gap in most Continuous Delivery initiatives.
So what’s the missing link? Requirements. The code may be of
the highest quality, but if it’s not reflecting what was specified in
the requirements, you may have built perfectly useless code.
Louis Srygley has an apt description for this:

then thought we had quality code.

“Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs
to an empty text file.”

But did that mean the applications we built were high quality? No!

BUILDING THINGS RIGHT VS. BUILDING THE RIGHT THINGS

and were following the style guide. If the code checked out, we

SETUP
I’ve worked with plenty of agile dev teams that have adopted
DevOps and achieved Continuous Delivery. These teams typically
create basic, sometimes throwaway code just so they can
quickly push a build out to users to get feedback and make quick
adjustments. Of course this approach generates technical debt;
however, at this stage, speed is more valued than code that is
perfectly written according to any style guide.
Upon seeing positive feedback from users, these teams start
constantly refactoring the code to keep technical debt at
manageable levels. Otherwise, all the speed they’ve gained to
roll out the first builds is lost as the code grows and becomes

hard to change due to the technical debt accrued. The ultimate
consequence: team capacity and velocity for future iterations is
decreased, taking everyone back to square one – with not only lessthan-adequate code, but also an application that users don’t like.

The use of diagrams such as visual flowcharts to represent
requirements is something that helps analysts, product
owners, developers, testers, and op engineers. Diagrams are a
great communication tool to remove ambiguities and prevent
misinterpretations by each of these stakeholders – ultimately
leading to fewer defects in the code, as the visual flowcharts enable
all stakeholders to have a common understanding from the get-go.
The key is to change our mindset of using “testing” as the only
means to achieve application quality.
With Continuous Delivery we’re realizing that although we can run
unlimited automated tests at all levels to find defects, this approach
will always be reactive and more costly than tests that always pass
because there were no defects. That means we have prevented

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FIG. 2

USER STORY 1
Enter search
parameters
and click on
search

START

Parameters
ok?

USER STORY 3

USER STORY 2
TRUE

Select
Departure
Flight

Select
Return
Flight

User
logged
on

Enter
Passenger
Info

TRUE

USER STORY 4
Review
and
Pay

Choose
Seats

Payment
Successful

FALSE

Validate
parameters

Validate
Payment
Info

TRUE

FINISH

defects from being written into the code, which consequently

The visual model of the Flight Booking Path Epic becomes the

means we have built quality into the application itself.

foundational layer for other stakeholders in the lifecycle.

Martin Thompson says it best:
“It took us centuries to reach our current capabilities in civil engineering,
so we should not be surprised by our current struggles with software.”

A CAD-like tool in software engineering helps us build a

We are on the right track. Tools have evolved and continue to
evolve at a never-before-seen pace. The area that has been lagging
in terms of advanced and easy-to-use tooling is the requirementsgathering and definition process. Martin Thompson also has a
good quote on that:
“If we look to other engineering [disciplines], we can see the use of tooling
to support the process of delivery rather than imposing a process on it.”

multilayered visual model of the requirements. These layers are
tied together, and just like the CAD tools in civil engineering, the
tool maintains full traceability across all layers as shown below.

LAYERED APPROACH TO CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
Modeler
(PO/BA/Tester)

MODEL
TEST DATA
SERVICES
TEST AUTOMATION
PERFORMANCE
TESTING

Look at civil engineering. CAD (computer-aided design) software
revolutionized the designing of buildings and structures. We’ve
been missing a CAD-like tool for software engineering, but now
we are at a point where we have highly advanced and easy-to-use
solutions to fill that gap.

• Performance SLAs
• Load Testing

Test Data
Engineer

• Find and reserve data automatically
• Match test data to each test case

Services
Engineer

• No dependency on external interfaces
• Accelerate code development

Test Automation
Engineer

• Scenarios
• User Profiles

• Draws and maintains business process flows
• Baselines understanding across the team
• Removes all ambiguities

Performance
Engineer

• Automatic creation of scripts
• Automatic impact analysis
• Automatic generation of load scenarios
• Automatic creation of scripts

BUILDING QUALITY INTO THE CODE = APPLICATION
QUALITY

So if there is a change to any of those layers, the impact is

It is very common today for a product owner to draw an initial

impacted layer, prompting the owner for a decision to address

sketch on a whiteboard describing what she wants built. That

that impact.

sketch is then further refined through multiple iterations until the
product owner is satisfied and accepts it.
That initial sketch for a simple Flight Booking Path example could
look something like this:

automatically identified and communicated to the owner of each

From that visual model, the tool can then automatically:
1. Generate manual test cases.
2. Find, copy, mask, or synthetically generate the test data
required for each test case.

US1

US2

US3

US4

3. Generate request/response pairs as well as provision virtual

SELECT
FLIGHTS

ENTER
PAX INFO

REVIEW
AND PAY

4. Generate test automation scripts in any language according

services for test cases to be able to run.
to the test automation tools being used by the team.

Then, through multiple conversations with the product owner,
developers, testers, and other stakeholders, the person assigned to
formally model the Epic could come up with the following model
shown at the top of the page.
As you can see, those conversations caused a few additional
process steps to be added as the model was formalized. We
now know that the product owner wants the user to select the
departure flight first and then select the return flight. It is also
clear that before going to the passenger information step, the user
must be prompted to log in. Lastly, it was clarified that the seats
must be chosen only after the passenger information has been
entered in the application.
Through the mere representation of the Epic in a visual model, ambiguities
are removed and defects are prevented from entering the application code.
Which means testing is truly “shifting left” in the lifecycle. And we’re
already starting to “build quality in” the application.

So while developers must continue to invest in increasing code
quality to build things right, the use of a CAD-like tool in software
engineering not only accelerates the software lifecycle (i.e.,
speed), but it also ensures developers are building the right things
(i.e., quality) from the beginning by providing unambiguous
requirements to all stakeholders across the SDLC.

A L E X MA R T I N S has more than 18 years of experience in largescale
application design, development and testing. For the last 13 years Alex has
been focused on software quality engineering and testing discipline as the
pillars for DevOps transformations. Going through all levels, from Tester to
Practice Leader in various technology companies such as EDS, IBM, HP and
Cognizant Technology Solutions, Alex built and ran several Enterprise
Testing Organizations in Latin America and the US for multiple clients. Alex now works as
a client advisor in the Continuous Delivery BU at CA Technologies and is also responsible
for the Continuous Quality Center of Excellence. When not talking tech, you will either
find Alex enjoying time with his family or on a beach somewhere surfing or kitesurfing.

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

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DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

Why You Must
Care about
DevOps
DevOps is becoming the de facto standard for software
development. Companies that have adopted DevOps principles
are disrupting industries, innovating faster, and leaving
competitors behind. These companies have aligned internal
stakeholders around the common objective of delivering quality
software rapidly, frequently, and reliably.
Yet, despite the benefits DevOps provides, many organizations
are reluctant to embrace it. Several factors underpin this
reluctance, including resistance to change. There is also
widespread misunderstanding of what DevOps is—a
misunderstanding amplified by vendors who say DevOps is all
about tooling.
There are also organizations that dismiss DevOps as a passing
fad, or simply don’t think that DevOps applies to them because

Companies that have adopted DevOps
principles are disrupting industries, innovating
faster, and leaving competitors behind.
they are not software companies. The facts, however, support
the growing consensus that DevOps is here to stay, and that
the benefits of DevOps extend to organizations in any industry.
An increasing number of organizations are realizing that today
they are a software company, that talented developers want to
work for companies where they can innovate instead of fight
fires all day, and that DevOps is a common-sense way to gain a
sustainable, competitive business advantage.
Any company that needs to deliver quality software faster needs
to care about DevOps and the supporting practice of continuous
delivery (CD), which enable continuously building, testing, and
deploying software in frequent, incremental releases.
The rapidly mounting evidence strongly suggests that
organizations that transition to DevOps get new innovations to
market more quickly and sustain or gain competitive advantage.

WRITTEN BY BRIAN DAWSON
DEVOPS EVANGELIST AT CLOUDBEES

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QUICK VIEW

Autonomy or Authority:
Why Microservices

Some of the
recommendations we hear
for building a microservices
architecture goes against
our sensibilities.

In this article we explore
a different model to
help guide us on our
microservices journey and
see why autonomy, not
authority, is a key piece to
the puzzle.

Should Be Event Driven
BY CHRISTIAN POSTA
PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT AT RED HAT

We’ve been discussing microservices in the
mainstream for over two years now. We’ve
heard many a blog or conference talk about
what microservices are, what benefits they
bring, and the success stories for some of the
companies that have been at the vanguard of
this movement. Each of those success stories
center around the capacity for these companies
to innovate, disrupt, and use software systems
to bring value to their respective customers.
Each story is slightly different but some
common themes emerge:
• Microservices helped them scale their organization.
• Microservices allowed them to move faster to try

new things (experiment).
• The cloud allowed them to keep the cost of these

experiments down.

In many ways, IT and other parts of the business have
been built for efficiencies and cost savings. Scientific
management has been the prevailing management
wisdom for decades and our organizations closely reflect
this (see Conway’s law). To use a metaphor as a mental
model: our organizations have been built like machines.
We’ve removed the need for anyone to know anything
about the purpose of the organization or their specific
roles within that purpose and have built processes,
bureaucracies, and punishments to keep things in
order. We’ve squeezed away every bit of inefficiency
and removed all variability in the name of repeatable
processes and known outcomes. We are able to take
the sum of the parts and do the one thing for which the
machine was designed.

seem to fit our mental model very well. When we hear

How does all this translate to our technology
implementations? We see our teams organized into
silos of development, testing, database administration,
security, etc. Making changes to this machine requires
careful coordination, months of planning and meetings.
We attempt to change the machine while it’s running
full steam ahead. Our distributed systems reflect our
organization: we have layers that correspond to the way
we work together. We have the UI layer. The process
management layer. The middleware, data access, and data

“have their own databases,” this shatters our comfortable

layers. We’ve even been told to squeeze variability and

The question then becomes, “how does one get their
hands on some microservices?”
We’re told our microservices should be independently
deployable. They should be autonomous. They should
have explicit boundaries. They should have their own
databases. They should communicate over lightweight
transports like HTTP. Nevertheless, these things don’t

safety guarantees we know and love. No matter how
many times we hear it, or even if we carved these
postulates into stone, they’re not going to be any more
helpful. What might be helpful is trying to understand
some of this from a different mental model. Let’s explore.

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variety out of our services. Highly normalized databases.
Anything that looks like duplication should be avoided.
Build everything for reuse so we can drive costs down.
I’m not advocating for doing the opposite per-se, but there
are problems with this model in our new, fast-changing
competitive landscape. The model of a machine works
great if we’re building physical products: a car, a phone,
or a microwave. If we already know what the outcome
should be, this model has shown to be amazingly
successful (see industrial revolution). However, this has
existentially changed. Companies are building value these
days through services, not through product alone. Service
design is key. This model of a purpose-built machine is
not a good model for building a service organization. Let’s
look at a different model.
What we really want is to find new ways to bring value
to our customers through service and stay ahead of
our competitors. To do that, we need to listen to our
customers. To be able to react and fulfill their needs, we
need to deal with the fact that customers don’t know
what they want. We need to explicitly deal with variety

This model of a city fits our microservices description
a little better. Now let’s start to translate to distributed
systems. First, each agent (service) has its own
understanding of the world. It has a history (series of
events) that gives its current frame of reference from
which it makes decisions. In a service, this frame of
reference is implemented in its own database potentially.
Services interact by asking each other to do something
(commands) or responding to some given fact (events).
It may observe an event and update its current
understanding of the world (its history or its state). In this
world, time and unreliability should be modeled explicitly.
A good way to do this is through passing messages.
Things may not show up on time. Things might get
lost. You may not be available to take commands. Other
services may not be around to help you. You may favor
autonomy (doing things yourself with the state you have)
versus authority (asking someone else who may have
the authoritative answer). To implement this, you may
have to distribute knowledge about events and state
through replication (in cities, we do this with broadcast
mechanisms like newspapers, the internet, social
networks, etc.).

(law of requisite variety) and variability. We need to build
“slack” into our systems to account for the “I don’t know”
factor. In many ways, innovation is about admitting “I
don’t know” and continually figuring out the right set of
experiments to ask the right questions and then learn
from the outcomes. Since software has eaten the world,
this translates into building systems that have variability,
feedback loops, and speed of change built into them. This
looks very different from a machine. The model I like to
use is a city.
Cities have many types of systems that co-exist, coevolve, and exhibit a lot of the same behaviors we
want. Emergent innovation through experimentation.
There isn’t top-down central control and planning and
highly optimized silos. We have lots of independent,
autonomous “agents” (people, families, businesses, etc.)
and the operating environment (laws, physical geography,
weather, and basic city services like roads, power, water,
waste disposal, etc.). These agents interact in cooperative
and also competitive ways. They interact with each
other by asking each other to do things or responding
to events to which they’re exposed. These agents are

When you do this, you may have to consider different
state consistency models. Starbucks doesn’t do two-phase
commits. Not everything can/should expect a two-phase
commit, consensus-approved consistency. You may need
something more relaxed like sequential/causal/eventual
consistency. You’ve got to make decisions with the
state you have and potentially be in charge or resolving
conflicts. You’ve got to equip your service to deal with
these scenarios. If you cannot deal with them you need
to learn from them. This requires changing behavior. In
a microservices world this translates to quickly making
changes to your service and getting them back out there
via a CI/CD pipeline.
Microservices architectures are a type of complexadaptive system. We need new models to reason about
this. Thankfully a lot of the distributed system theory,
research, and practices have been around for 40+ years
and innately take this type of system into account (as a
distributed system is itself a complex-adaptive system!).
We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to do microservices,
just re-orient our mental model and be a catalyst for
change throughout our organizations.

driven by purpose (survival, personal/spiritual/monetary
fulfillment, curiosity, etc.), and what emerges through
these simple elements is an amazingly rich, resilient, and
innovative ecosystem. Cities scale amazingly (see NYC).
They innovate (see San Francisco, Seattle, etc.). There are
no single points of failure. They recover from catastrophic
failures (see natural or human-made catastrophes). And
out of all of this, there is no single authoritative figure or
set of figures that dictate how all of this happens.

C HR I ST I A N P OSTA (@christianposta) is a Principal
Architect at Red Hat and well known for being an author
(Microservices for Java Developers, O’Reilly 2016), frequent
blogger, speaker, open-source enthusiast, and committer on
Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel, Fabric8, and others. Christian has spent
time at web-scale companies and now helps companies creating and
deploying large-scale distributed architectures - many of what are now
called Microservices based. He enjoys mentoring, training, and leading
teams to be successful with distributed systems concepts, microservices,
DevOps, and cloud-native application design.

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

SPONSORED OPINION

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

Microservices Are
a Keystone of
Continuous Delivery
Some consider microservices a technology du jour, another
fad that’s due to pass; others (including myself) argue that
instead they’re the missing piece for truly enabling teams to
adopt Continuous Delivery.
HIGHER VELOCITY
With microservices focusing on small pieces of functionality
of a larger application, it’s become much easier to iterate
around single pieces, getting new features and bug fixes
in front of customers faster, shortening the feedback cycle
significantly.
FEWER DEPENDENCIES
Smaller services have a key benefit that primes them
for Continuous Delivery. Their sharp focus on a specific
application concern keeps their dependencies small,

Travis CI

isolating them from variances and changes while making
it easier to standardize on build environments. Most
importantly, fewer dependencies help keep the build fast.
MANAGING COMPLEXITY
In return, communication between teams working on
different microservices has become more important
than ever. An increasing number of services talking to
each other consequently increases the complexity in
interactions, both between the services themselves and the
teams working on them.
WORKING AT (TEAM) SCALE
Microservices scale well across teams, allowing new
services and teams to come and go as needed. In turn, an
organization needs a delivery tool that can adopt to those
ever-changing needs quickly and seamlessly.
Microservices enable the fast feedback cycles that
Continuous Delivery promotes, but teams adopting them
need to make sure that their tool of choice can support the
benefits that microservices bring while also enabling them
to scale up to new services and new teams easily.

WRITTEN BY MATHIAS MEYER
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT TRAVIS CI

By Travis CI

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QUICK VIEW

Executive Insights
on the State of
DevOps

The most important elements
of DevOps are: 1) people, 2)
process, and 3) technology.

The biggest change being
seen in DevOps is its
transition from a “new and
different” way of working to
“the new normal.”

The greatest value of DevOps
is improved speed to market
with a quality product that
meets or exceeds customer
expectations.

BY TOM SMITH
RESEARCH ANALYST AT DZONE

To gather insights on the state of the DevOps
movement in 2017, we talked to 16 executives from 14
companies who are implementing DevOps in their own
organization and/or providing DevOps solutions to other
organizations. Specifically, we spoke to:
MICHAEL SCHMIDT, Senior Director, Automic
AMIT ASHBEL, Director of Product Marketing & Cyber Security
Evangelist, Checkmarx
SACHA LABOUREY, CEO and Founder, CloudBees
SAMER FALLOUH, V.P. Engineering and
ANDREW TURNER, Senior Solution Engineer, Dialexa
ANDREAS GRABNER, Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

possibly can. This is necessary to be able to scale and to make
the feedback loop smaller, to release faster, to increase quality,
and to reuse assets across development, testing, and monitoring.
While these changes are not easy, they will ultimately improve the
quality of life for everyone in development, operations, security,
testing, and sales, as well as the end-user experience (UX).

02 The biggest change to DevOps has been its acceptance.
DevOps has gone from being new and different to the “new
normal.” DevOps outperforms any other method by a significant
margin, is causing significant disruption in the industry - even
in enterprise companies with legacy systems that are willing
to make the change. It has moved from just being a bottom-up
implementation to top-down since senior management can see the
results it achieves.

ANDERS WALLGREN, CTO, Electric Cloud
JOB VAN DER VOORT, V.P. of Product, GitLab
CHARLES KENDRICK, CTO, Isomorphic Software
CRAIG LUREY, CTO and Co-Founder, Keeper Security
JOSH ATWELL, Developer Advocate, NetApp SolidFire

The next biggest changes identified are the increase in automation
and collaboration. More automation and less operations solves
problems faster. Automation is built in up front to optimize build
time versus set-up and onboarding. More focus on containers and
replicable builds assist with scaling, sharing, and collaboration.

JOAN WRABETZ, CTO, Quali
JOE ALFARO, V.P. of Engineering, Sauce Labs

We’re not only breaking down walls between developers and

NIKHIL KAUL, Product Marketing Manager Testing and

operations but also with support, sales, and marketing to meet the

HARSH UPRETI, Product Marketing Manager API, SmartBear Software
ANDI MANN, Chief Technology Advocate, splunk

needs of all departments. It’s still about people collaborating and
finding a better way to get something developed.

03 The greatest value delivered by DevOps is improved speed

KEY FINDINGS

to market with a quality product that meets or exceeds customer

01 The most important elements of DevOps are 1) people; 2)

expectations. Fast iteration gets new features out faster at higher

process; and, 3) technology. People are the most important since

quality, delivering value more quickly. You’re faster because you’re

they need to change the culture and the mindset. Process involves

focusing on the business value and building what the customer

tearing down walls between all departments, defining the process,

wants rather than some shiny new technology. Continuous

and creating controls that cannot be violated – by anyone. Optimize

deployment enables features and fixes to be rolled out more

the use of third-party technology to automate everything you

quickly and enhances customer engagement. This reduces

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wasteful development. We’ve seen a 30% improvement in customer

change, you’ll lose people and be replaced by your competitors who

satisfaction, a 10x increase in innovation velocity, and a 2x

have embraced change to develop quality code more quickly.

increase in efficiency.
Early in the adoption and implementation, people will blame tools
DevOps is a repeatable process where every member of the team

for finding the errors in the code. However, root-cause analysis will

knows where everything is in the process, and each team member

help uncover the source of the problem.

knows their role. This results in a more reliable path, faster and
more stable releases. Better teamwork equals better products.

Help people collaborate, communicate, and integrate to deliver
better software. Build security and testing into automated

04 Most respondents are using their own solutions to

processes from the beginning and see the benefits of the journey

implement DevOps. In addition, the most frequently used tools are

rather than looking for a perfect end state (hint: it doesn’t exist).

Confluence, Jenkins, JIRA, Team City, and Travis, with 14 others

08 The greatest opportunities for the future of DevOps are: 1)

being mentioned.

continued growth of the cloud; 2) tools facilitating automation; 3)

05 Real-world problems being solved by DevOps revolve

containers; and 4) company-wide collaboration. There’s a healthy

around improving quality, speed to market, and reducing cycle

symbiosis between DevOps and the cloud. As AWS, Red Hat, and

times with automation. An online trading company went from

Azure grow, DevOps will grow exponentially. AWS is providing

deployments that took weeks to deployments in under a minute.

more tools to facilitate automation, and there is consolidation

The ability for any company to test on all operating systems,
browsers, and devices, thereby removing testing from the chain
of development, lets developers focus on building business
value. DevOps provides the ability to receive a bug report and
turn around a fix the same day with confidence the fix has
not introduced any subtle regressions. Big companies with
geographically distributed developers have the ability to check
in source code to expedite the development process. Replacing
manual testing with automated can save hundreds of thousands
of dollars or reduce headcount by 35%. A gaming company with a
complex application portfolio can make several thousand updates

of tools so you don’t have to custom build deployments. We
will see greater adoption of the public cloud by regulated
industry. Containers will become more important automating
the flow through the cloud. DevOps will affect all aspects of the
organization fostering communication and collaboration among
developers, operations, QA, security, testing, deployment, business
planning, and BPO to provide a better user experience.
There’s only a two percent adoption of DevOps practices around
the world. We will move from early adoption to general adoption by
sharing stories about what we’ve done and how tools can remove
fear and pain with ongoing monitoring.

every day, while a telecommunications company with more than
100 apps can combine their business and operations systems on

09 One consistent theme about what developers need to keep in

the same platform.

mind with regards to DevOps and Continuous Delivery is the need
to be flexible and collaborative. Be open to collaboration, sharing,

06 The obstacles to success revolve around people. People

and gaining empathy for those you are working with – operations,

in power can be slow to change. Kingdoms may go away, and

as well as the end user. In addition, don’t boil the ocean. Find a

this results in power battles. People in management are too

problem and fix a problem. Fail fast, cheap, and small. Don’t be

comfortable in their current jobs and don’t want to change. There’s

tempted to move backward in the DevOps process. Everything has a

a fear of having greater responsibility for the code running in

tax associated with it. Keep this in mind and commit to the DevOps

production. However, this gives the engineering team a lot of

process. The more you know about testing, writing code for testing,

freedom to try new things and deploy as they wish with almost

and writing automation, the more valuable you will be as DevOps

instant gratification by seeing the impact code has on end users.

becomes more ingrained.

Everything is mental – the “not built here mentality,” especially
with start-ups. Remove this mentality and focus on where your

10 A couple of themes surfaced when we asked respondents what

company adds value. Don’t worry about your kingdom, worry about

else we needed to consider with regards to DevOps for this research

the needs of your customers.

guide. We learned it’s important to understand that DevOps is not
a product, it’s an implementation of a manufacturing process that

DevOps is a process of incremental improvement that takes time.

relates to technology. DevOps principles are applicable throughout

It’s an evolutionary method, not a quick fix. Netflix and Google

the industry, reducing uncertainly and improving the efficiency of

took seven years. It may be painful getting started, but once you

process management. Furthermore, there is the need for operations

get past the initial start-up issues and address them, the tools and

and developers to be using the same set of tools to solve common

the automation reduce the number of incidents, and, consequently,

problems whereby the tools are facilitating communication,

the amount of pain felt by the organization. Resist the urge to go

collaboration, and problem solving.

backwards in the process for sake of urgency. Do the hard work,
put the processes, tools, and automation in place, and you will reap
the benefits.

07 The greatest concern regarding DevOps goes back to people
not being willing to change or not being fully committed to the
change. You must change to produce value and velocity. If you don’t

TOM S M I T H is a Research Analyst at DZone who excels at
gathering insights from analytics—both quantitative and qualitative—
to drive business results. His passion is sharing information of value
to help people succeed. In his spare time, you can find him either
eating at Chipotle or working out at the gym.

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SPONSORED OPINION

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Ship features & fix issues
faster with Continuous
Delivery to Kubernetes

Automatically enable continuous delivery to
Kubernetes while maintaining best practice of
storing config in version control.
But how can you automatically update the version tag in your
version controlled manifest?

Achieving continuous delivery improves deployment time and
reliability. Yet only 40% of developers doing CI are doing CD. With
Weave Flux, adding CD to your CI pipeline is simple. Kubernetes is
a powerful platform for running Docker containers. You’ll write a
“manifest,” which is a YAML file that describes which containers to
run as part of the app.

You could write a script to clone your config repo, parse the YAML,
automatically replace the version string in your manifests, push
the change to your config repo, and deploy it to Kubernetes. But
that’s a lot of work—and then you have to maintain it. Then what
happens if you want to rollback a release to a previous version? Or
have different policies for prod and staging?

An example manifest (from https://git.io/vMd2M) looks like:

Weave Flux solves these problems; is an open source project, and

containers:

available as part of the Weave Cloud service. Weave Cloud also

- name: front-end

provides tools to operate containers such as Prometheus monitoring,

image: weaveworksdemos/front-end:0.3.1

real time exploration in a troubleshooting dashboard.
Join our user group and attend one of our free online trainings about

The version tag is ‘0.3.1’, best practice being that you version

Kubernetes, Weave Cloud, and more here.

control your manifests and tag all of your Docker images. It’s bad
news if you use ‘latest’ and then can’t control which version of your

WRITTEN BY LUKE MARSDEN

Docker image is running in production!

HEAD OF DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE AT WEAVEWORKS

Weave Cloud By Weaveworks
Weave Cloud makes it simple for DevOps team to operationalize containers,
while using their choice of orchestration platform
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE

STRENGTHS

Containers and
Microservices /
SaaS

Continuously
Updated

Yes

• Deploy, troubleshoot, monitor, and secure

containers across hosts.
• Setup security policy and firewalls.

CASE STUDY

• Troubleshoot and explore your app topology in

Adopting containers and microservices can be challenging. Big platforms
add complexity that give development teams headaches. Convenient,
flexible, and open source, Weave Cloud simplifies delivery for cloud-native

real-time.
• Deploy and upgrade apps safely to the cloud

continuously.

development.
Weave Cloud is a SaaS offering that lets Dev/DevOps operationalize

• Monitor your app and infrastructure with

Prometheus monitoring.

containers via extensions to their choice of orchestration platform.
Weave Cloud accelerates development, replacing manual configuration
and scripting with automation, and provides all of the container and
orchestrator-level information needed to manage. It delivers features like
Prometheus monitoring, continuous deployment, firewall management,
and troubleshooting.

SUPPORTED INTEGRATIONS
• Kubernetes

• Microsoft Azure

• Docker

• Mesosphere

• AWS

BLOG weave.works/blog

TWITTER @weaveworks

WEBSITE weave.works

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QUICK VIEW

Branching
Considered Harmful!
(for Continuous Integration)

Branch-based development can
be a good trade-off in scenarios
such as open-source projects,
but should be Considered
Harmful for genuine Continuous
Integration.

A trunk-based approach can
work, and it enforces good
practices we otherwise often
fail to get around to.

Branches can also be useful in
a trunk-based development
environment.

Consider trunk-based
development as a goal for your
teams.

BY ANDREW PHILLIPS
VP DEVOPS STRATEGY AT XEBIALABS

If you’re working in what you might consider
a reasonably modern software development
environment, chances are you’re doing Agile, and
are aspiring to build out a Continuous Integration
and Deployment pipeline to push code to
production quickly. Chances are that you’re also
doing some form of branch-based development
– whether straightforward feature branches,
something more formalized such as git-flow, or a
pull request-based process using GitHub or similar.

requests, and hence branches, the way many, many well-known
and successful open-source projects work?

Why the branches? How and when did the perception arise that
branching is A Good Thing? A branch-based development
strategy generally implies delayed merging, and delayed
merging is, almost literally, the exact opposite of the
“continuous integration” most teams consider themselves to
be practicing. Branch-based development usually means either
largely more complex and risky merges, or a manual code
review bottleneck, or both – things we almost never want in our
process if the aim to deliver code to production quickly.

Even if you have a centralized server which is the canonical
reference for a particular codebase, branches and pull request
reviews make sense if you are in an environment where many
contributions are being proposed by developers who are not
familiar with the code, and who in addition are not in a position
to ask for advice from more expert developers on an ongoing
basis. They may be geographically separated, with few or no
overlapping working hours to allow for discussions, or they
may work for different companies and simply do not have the
opportunity to contact the experts often.

I should briefly clarify that what I mean by “branch-based
development strategy” here are approaches that allow for, or
even encourage, the existence of branches that accumulate
changes that are not on trunk (or “master”, or “HEAD”, or
whatever the mainline branch in your environment is called)
for days, weeks, or longer. These changes are only incorporated
into trunk after an explicit, non-automated approval. There are
also development strategies using branches that in practice look
much more like trunk-based development – more on those later.
But isn’t branch-based development so well supported by
leading source control management systems such as Git
because it’s A Good Thing? Aren’t contributions via pull

Yes, many open-source projects, including the Linux kernel
community that gave rise to Git, use branches in their
development strategy – and for good reason. If you are
working in a highly distributed environment where there is
no centralized server, there can be no notion of “merging to
master” or “committing to trunk”, because no such thing as
trunk exists. Determining the “current global state of trunk”
requires merging multiple tracks of development from separate
repositories.

In such cases, a development strategy using branches and
delayed integration – usually after manual code review –
makes sense as an acceptable compromise given the various
constraints. However, projects in these situations are very
rarely examples of code that gets shipped to production
frequently. So if that is our goal, they hardly seem like models
that we should be seeking to emulate.
More importantly, the constraints under which these projects
operate are simply not applicable to most commercial software
development settings. We almost always have a central
repository whose mainline is the global reference point so that

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the idea of “merging to trunk” on an ongoing basis is indeed
meaningful. And we usually have sufficiently frequent access to
someone with enough experience of the codebase that we could
arrange for reasonably regular feedback if we so chose.
“So what exactly are you proposing?” I hear you ask. I am
proposing something we’ll refer to here as “trunk-based
development.” It’s not a new concept by any means, having
been around at least as long as the idea of continuous
integration, to which it is closely related. But I think that, if we
are serious in our desire to ship code quickly, it’s definitely a
concept worth revisiting. It goes something like this:
1. When you have written an amount of code locally that you

think should work, commit it to trunk.
2. A commit to trunk triggers a series of tests and verification

steps that are intended to ensure that the system will not be
negatively impacted by the change.
3. If all the tests and verification steps succeed, the code

change is deployed to production.
4. Otherwise, the commit could be rolled back automatically,

or the “offending” developer is notified that they have
broken trunk.
That’s all – a pretty straightforward setup. But what about
style checks or architectural reviews? What about all those
work-in-progress commits? Won’t we be breaking production
all the time with problems the tests don’t catch, or with
incompatibilities that we’re introducing?
Yes, in most current setups committing straight to trunk and
thence to production would indeed end up breaking things
a fair amount of the time. And that is precisely the point: by
allowing ourselves to develop “off trunk” for long periods of
time, we allow ourselves to ignore the work necessary to protect
trunk and production from bad code.
Avoiding work may not sound like a bad thing, but it almost
always comes at the cost of a steadily worsening review
bottleneck that can see even simple changes delayed for days or
more. And if we are truly aiming for a continuous deployment
setup, we will eventually need to put in the effort to protect
trunk anyway.
Furthermore, the steps we need to take in a trunk-based
development environment in order to prevent production
incidents are exactly the kinds of best practice steps we
generally talk about striving for.
Want more architectural and code style input? Introduce
regular “check-ins” with a more experienced colleague, or do
more pair programming! Concerned about checking in code
that compiles but doesn’t work correctly when it makes it to
production? Write more tests to ensure your code does what
you expect! Working on a feature that shouldn’t be active
until changes to other systems are deployed? Use feature
flags! Aware that your system is too complicated to be tested
reliably with unit and integration tests? Implement automated

monitoring of system health, customer metrics, etc., and alert
or roll back if behavior is unexpectedly poor! And so on.
These are all things we know about and generally agree that
we should have – we just never get round to them because we
allow ourselves to work in a manner that doesn’t compel us to
implement them to keep our systems running.
But if we do force ourselves to go down this path, the benefits
in terms of speed can be enormous. A colleague who tried to
see how far he could take this ended up with what he called
“ludicrous mode”: every time a file was saved in his IDE, the
code would be compiled and, if successful, the unit tests for
that project were run. If those succeeded, the change would
automatically be committed to trunk and, if no stages in the
subsequent delivery pipeline failed, would make its way all the
way to production.
At his peak, he was deploying to production fifty times an hour.
But he said that the first thing the experiment taught him
is that it was essential to write failing unit tests first before
starting on the actual implementation, because that was
required to ensure bad code didn’t make it to production. Good
practice not as a nice-to-have, but out of necessity!
Having said all that, in practical terms there are still good
use cases for branches, of course: for example, they are often
the easiest way of “throwing a code diff out there,” especially
during a discussion with remote participants. It’s also easier
in many current continuous integration and deployment tools
to configure a “create pull request, trigger tests, automatically
merge to trunk, continue pipeline” flow than the “merge to
trunk, trigger tests, continue pipeline or automatically revert”
process sketched above.
The key to both of these cases, though, is that they involve,
respectively, throw-away and short-lived branches that are
automatically merged into trunk. There is no long-running “off
trunk” development followed by a large merge or manual review.
Of course, for most teams (including the ones I am part of!)
trunk-based development isn’t something that could be
implemented today: a lot of the work required to protect trunk
from bad commits is still needed, and that work isn’t easily or
quickly done. But we can embrace trunk-based development
as a desirable goal and reconsider our use of branch-based
approaches that build delay and manual bottlenecks into our
flow to production. That way, we can get back to focusing on
what it would take to build a system and process that will allow
us to deliver code as quickly and safely as we can.
So go on, ask yourself: what would your team need to do to be
able to develop safely on trunk?

A N D R E W P HI L L I P S heads up strategy at XebiaLabs, developing software for visibility, automation, and control of Continuous
Delivery and DevOps in the enterprise. He is an evangelist and
thought leader in the DevOps and Continuous Delivery space. When
not “developing in PowerPoint,” Andrew contributes to a number of opensource projects, including the multi-cloud toolkit Apache jclouds.

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A brief history of web and mobile app testing.

BEFORE SAUCE LABS
Devices. Delays. Despair.

AFTER SAUCE LABS
Automated. Accelerated. Awesome.

Find out how Sauce Labs
can accelerate your testing
to the speed of awesome.
For a demo, please visit saucelabs.com/demo
Email sales@saucelabs.com or call (855) 677-0011 to learn more.

SPONSORED OPINION

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Automated Testing:
The Glue Between
Dev and Ops

of the time. It also reduces the resource drain associated with
identifying and resolving false positives, or failures due to
problems in the test infrastructure.

• The ability to scale rapidly. Your testing platform should be
able to perform tests as quickly as needed, and be able to do so
across all required platforms, browsers, and devices. It should
also be highly scalable to support as many parallel tests at one
time as you require.

• Highly automated. DevOps teams achieve their speed and

In order to reap the full benefits of DevOps, organizations must
integrate automated software testing into their continuous
delivery pipelines. It is the only way to ensure that releases
occur at both a high frequency, and with a high level of quality.

agility in part by automating as much of the software delivery
process as possible. Your testing solution should work
seamlessly with other components of your toolchain, most
notably your CI and collaboration tools.

In order to integrate continuous testing effectively into a
DevOps toolchain, look for the following essential features
when evaluating an automated testing platform:

• Security. In a DevOps environment, all members of the
team have an important role to play in keeping applications
secure. Testing platforms, therefore, need enterprise-grade
security features.

• Support for a variety of languages, tools, and frameworks.
The programming languages and development tools that your
DevOps teams use today are likely to change in the future.
Look for a testing solution that can support a broad array of
languages, tools, and frameworks.

A software testing platform that includes these qualities
will empower your organization to derive full value from its
migration to a DevOps-based workflow by maximizing the agility,
scalability, and continuity of your software delivery pipeline.

• Cloud testing. On-demand cloud-based testing is the most
cost-efficient option because it obviates the need to set up and
maintain an on-premises test grid that is underutilized most

WRITTEN BY LUBOS PAROBEK
VP OF PRODUCTS, SAUCE LABS

Automated Testing Platform By Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs accelerates the software development process by providing the world’s
largest automated testing cloud for mobile and web applications.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE

STRENGTHS

Automated
Testing Platform

Daily

Yes

• Enterprise-grade cloud-based test infrastructure
provides instant access to more than 800+ browser/OS/
platform configurations

CASE STUDY
As a cutting edge development team, Dollar Shave Club was quick to

• Highly scalable, on-demand platform reduces testing
time from hours to minutes when tests are run in

adopt DevOps. However, the QA team was spending too much time testing

parallel

their website. In fact, it took more than 10 hours to do a full test suite, and
it did not cover the diverse set of devices and browsers for their users.
To increase its test coverage while reducing test execution time, Dollar

• Optimized for CI/CD workflows, testing frameworks,
tools and services

Shave Club decided on Sauce Labs for cloud-based automated testing. The
QA team now runs automated functional, regression, and configuration
tests in parallel for both its web and mobile applications. Each day, Dollar

• Single platform for all your testing needs—automated
& manual testing across desktop web, mobile web, and

Shave Club can now run more than one hundred unique tests on desktop

native/hybrid iOS and Android apps

web, mobile web, and its native iOS and Android apps. Each test runs
several times a day, on multiple browsers and platforms. Because Sauce
Labs integrates with their Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) server, the
company can test code automatically with each commit, getting results
back within 10 minutes of each check-in. By running their tests in parallel
on Sauce Labs, Dollar Shave Club is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars

• American Express

• IBM

• Salesforce

per year due to reduced testing time and increased developer productivity.

• Home Depot

• New Relic

• Slack

BLOG saucelabs.com/blog

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS

TWITTER @saucelabs

WEBSITE saucelabs.com

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QUICK VIEW

Microservices and
Docker at Scale:
The PB&J of Modern Application Delivery

BY ANDERS WALLGREN
CTO AT ELECTRIC CLOUD

02 Microservices and containers are
complex patterns/tools for solving
complex problems. They are not for
everyone. Key challenges are around
test automation, pipeline variations,
operations complexity, monitoring,
logging, and remediation.
03 You need to figure out if they are right
for your use case, and ensure you
develop the skills and key prerequisites
to make microservices and large-scale
container deployments work for you.

Microservices and containers have recently garnered
a lot of attention in the DevOps community.
Docker has matured, and is expanding from being
predominantly used in the Build/Test stages to
Production deployments. Similarly, microservices
are expanding from being used mostly for greenfield
web services to being used in the enterprise—as
organizations explore ways to decompose their
monolith applications to support faster release cycles.

Containers offer a well defined, isolated runtime environment.
Instead of shipping an artifact and all of its variables,
containers support packaging everything into a Dockertype file that is promoted through the pipeline as a single
container in a consistent environment. In addition to isolation
and consistent environment, containers also have very low
overhead of running a container process. This support for
environment consistency from development to production,
alongside extremely fast provisioning, spin-up, and scaling,
accelerate and simplify both development and operations.

As organizations strive to scale their application
development and releases to achieve Continuous
Delivery, microservices and containers, although
challenging, are increasingly considered. While both
offer benefits, they are not “one size fits all,” and we
see organizations still experimenting with these
technologies and design patterns for their specific
use cases and environment.

WHY RUN MICROSERVICES IN CONTAINERS?
Running microservices-based applications in a containerized
environment makes a lot of sense. Docker and microservices
are natural companions, forming the foundation for modern
application delivery.

WHY MICROSERVICES? WHY CONTAINERS?
Microservices are an attractive DevOps pattern because of
their enablement of speed to market. With each microservice
being developed, deployed, and run independently (often
using different languages, technology stacks, and tools),
microservices allow organizations to “divide and conquer,”
and scale teams and applications more efficiently. When the
pipeline is not locked into a monolithic configuration—of
either toolset, component dependencies, release processes,
or infrastructure—there is a unique ability to better scale
development and operations. It also helps organizations
easily determine what services don’t need scaling in order to
optimize resource utilization.

01 Microservices and containers have
several benefits, including: allowing
organizations to “divide and conquer,”
scale teams and applications more
efficiently, and offer a consistent,
isolated runtime environment.

At a high level, microservices and Docker together are the
PB&J of DevOps because:
• They are both aimed at doing one thing well, and those
things are complimentary.
• What you need to learn to be good at one translates well
to the other.
More specifically:
• Purpose
-- A microservice is (generally) a single process focused
on one aspect of the application, operating in isolation
as much as possible.

-- A Docker container runs a single process in a welldefined environment.
• Complexity
-- With microservices you now need to deploy,
coordinate, and run multiple services (dozens to

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hundreds), whereas before you might have had a more
traditional three-tier/monolithic architecture. While
microservices support agility—particularly on the
development side—they come with many technical
challenges, mainly on the operations side.

-- Containers help with this complexity because they
make it easy and fast to deploy services in containers,
mainly for developers.
• Scaling
-- Microservices make it easier to scale because each
service can scale independently of other services.
-- Container-native cluster orchestration tools, such as
Kubernetes, and cloud environments, such as Amazon
ECS and Google Container Engine (GKE), provide
mechanisms for easily scaling containers based on
load and business rules.
• System Comprehension
-- Both microservices and containers essentially force
you into better system comprehension—you can’t
be successful with these technologies if you don’t
have a thorough understanding of your architecture,
topology, functionality, operations, and performance.
Challenges
Managing microservices and large-scale Docker deployments
pose unique challenges for enterprise IT. Because there is
so much overlap in terms of what an organization has to
be proficient at in order to successfully deploy and modify
microservices and containers, there is quite a bit overlap in
terms of challenges and best practices for operationalizing
containers and microservices at scale.

•

Increased pipeline variations: Orchestrating the delivery
pipeline becomes more complex, with more moving parts.
When you split a monolith into several microservices,
the number of pipelines might jump from one to 50 (or
however many microservices you have set up). You need
to consider how many different teams you will need
and whether you have enough people to support each
microservice/pipeline.
Testing becomes more complex. There is a larger amount
of testing that needs to be taken into consideration–
integration testing, API contract testing, static analysis,
and more.
Deployment complexity increases. While scaling the
containerized app is fairly easy, there’s a lot of activity
that needs to happen first. It must be deployed for
development and testing many times throughout the
pipeline, before being released to production. With so
many different services developed independently, the
number of deployments increases dramatically.
Monitoring, logging, and remediation become very important
and increasingly difficult because there are more moving

parts and different distributed services that comprise the
entire user experience and application performance.

•

There are numerous different toolchains, architectures,
and environments to manage.

•

There is a need to take into consideration existing legacy
applications and how these are coordinated with the new
services and functionality of container- or microservicesbased applications.

•

Governance and auditing (particularly at the enterprise
level) become more complicated with such a large
distributed environment, and with organizations having
to support both containers and microservices, alongside
traditional releases and monolithic applications.

In addition to these common challenges, microservices and
containers each pose their own unique challenges. If you’re
considering microservices, know that:

• Distributed systems are difficult and mandate strong
system comprehension.
• Service composition is tricky and can be expensive
to change. Start as a monolith, and avoid premature
decomposition, until you understand your application’s
behavior thoroughly.
• Inter-process failure modes need to be accounted for and
although abstractions look good on paper they are prone
to bottlenecks.
• Pay attention to transaction boundaries and foreign-key
relationship as they’ll make it harder to decompose.
• Consider event-based techniques to decrease coupling
further.
• For API and services’ SLA - “Be conservative in what you do,
be liberal in what you accept from others”
• State management is hard–transactions, caching, and
other fun things...
• Testing (particularly integration testing between services)
and monitoring (because of the increased number of
services) become way more complex.
• Service virtualization, service discovery, and proper
design of API integration points and backwardscompatibility are a must.
• Troubleshooting failures: “every outage is a murder mystery.”
• Even if a service is small, the deployment footprint must
be taken into account.
• You rely on the network for everything-you need to
consider bandwidth, latency, reliability.
• What do you do with legacy apps: Rewrite? Ignore? Hybrid?

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For containers:
• Security is a critical challenge–both because it is still
a relatively new technology, and due to the security
concerns for downloading an image file. Containers are
black boxes to OpSec: less control, less visibility inside the
container, and existing tools may not be container-savvy.
Be sure to sign & scan images, validate libraries, etc.;
harden the container environment as well; drop privileges
early, and use fine-grained access control so it’s not
all root. Be smart about credentials (container services
can help).

• Monitoring is tricky, since container instances may be
dropped or span-up continuously. Logging and monitoring
needs to be configured to decommission expired
containers, or save the log and data-business data,
reference data, compliance data, logs, diagnostics-from
other (temporal) instances.
• Know what’s running where, and why, and avoid image
bloat and container sprawl.
• Since the containers hosting and cluster orchestration
market is still emerging, we see users experimenting a lot
with running containers across multiple environments,
or using different cluster orchestration tools and APIs.
These early adopters need to manage containers while
minimizing the risk of lock-in to a specific cloud vendor
or point-tool, or having to invest a lot of work (and steep
learning curve) in rewriting complex scripting in order to
repurpose their deployment or release processes to fit a
new container environment or tool.
BEST PRACTICES FOR MICROSERVICES AND CONTAINERS
While, admittedly, there are a fair number of challenges
when it comes to deploying microservices and containers,
the end-result, will be reduced overhead costs and faster
time to market. If microservices and containers make the
most sense for your application use case, there is a great
deal of planning that needs to happen before you decompose
your application to a set of hundreds of different services,
or migrate your data center to a container environment.
Without careful planning and following industry best
practices, it can be easy to lose the advantages of
microservices and containers.
To successfully run microservices and containers at scale,
there are certain skill sets that the organization must
possess throughout the software delivery cycle:

• Build domain knowledge. Before deploying microservices
it is critically important to understand the domain before
making difficult decisions about where to partition the
problem into different services. Stay monolithic for a
while. Keep it modular and write good code.
• Each service should have independent CI and
Deployment pipelines so you can independently build,
verify, and deploy each service without having to take
into account the state of delivery for any other service.

• Pipeline automation: A ticketing system is not
automation. With the increase in number of pipelines
and pipeline complexity, you must be able to orchestrate
your end-to-end process, including all the point-tools,
environments, and configuration. You need to automate
the entire process-from CI, testing, configuration,
infrastructure provisioning, deployments, application
release processes, and production feedback loops.
• Test automation: Without first setting up automated
testing, microservices and containers will likely become a
nightmare. An automated test framework will check that
everything is ready to go at the end of the pipeline and
boost confidence for production teams.
• Use an enterprise registry for containers. Know where
data is going to be stored and pay attention to security by
adding modular security tools into the software pipeline.
• Know what’s running where and why. Understand the
platform limitations and avoid image bloat.
• Your pipeline must be tools/environment agnostic so
you can support each workflow and tool chain, no matter
what they are, and so that you can easily port your
processes between services and container environments.
• Consistent logging and monitoring across all services
provides the feedback loop to your pipeline. Make sure
your pipeline automation plugs into your monitoring
so that alerts can trigger automatic processes such as
rolling back a service, switching between blue/green
deployments, scaling, and so on. Your monitoring/
performance testing tool needs allow you to track a
request through the system even as it bounces between
different services.
• Be rigorous in handling failures (consider using Hystrix,
for example, to bake in better resiliency).
• Be flexible at staffing and organizational design for
microservices. Consider whether there are enough people
for one team per service.
There is increasing interest in microservices and containers,
and for good reasons. However, businesses need to make
sure they have the skills and knowledge for overcoming
the challenges of managing these technologies reliably, at
scale. It is critical to plan and model your software delivery
strategy, and align its objectives with the right skill sets and
tools, so you can achieve the faster releases and reduced
overhead that microservices and containers can offer.

A N D E R S WA L LG R E N is Chief Technology Officer at
Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing
and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud,
he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse and
management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software, and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership
roles in delivering award-winning technologies such as Macromedia’s
Director 7. Anders holds a B.SC from MIT.

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Diving Deeper
INTO DEVOPS

TOP #DEVOPS TWITTER FEEDS

DEVOPS ZONES

To follow right away

Learn more & engage your peers in our Security-related topic portals

@martinfowler

@auxesis

DevOps

dzone.com/devops
DevOps is a cultural movement supported by exciting new tools that

@bridgetkromhout

@RealGeneKim

@ChrisShort

@nicolefv

The DevOps Zone is your hot spot for news and resources about

@UberGeekGirl

@damonedwards

Cloud

@kelseyhightower

@botchagalupe

is aimed at encouraging close cooperation within cross-disciplinary
teams of developers, and IT operations, and system admins.
Continuous Delivery, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, and more.

dzone.com/cloud
The Cloud Zone covers the host of providers and utilities that make cloud
computing possible and push the limits (and savings) with which we
can deploy, store, and host applications in a flexible, elastic manner. The

TOP DEVOPS REFCARDZ
Getting Started With Git
dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-git
This updated Refcard explains why so many developers are migrating to this
exciting platform. Learn about creating a new Git repository, cloning existing
projects, the remote workflow, and more to pave the way for limitless content
version control.

Continuous Delivery Patterns
dzone.com/refcardz/continuous-delivery-patterns
Functional programming is a software paradigm that will radically change the way
in which you approach any programming endeavor. Combining simple functions to
create more meaningful programs is the central theme of functional programming.

Cloud Zone focuses on PaaS, infrastructures, security, scalability, and
hosting servers.

Agile

dzone.com/agile
In the software development world, Agile methodology has overthrown
older styles of workflow in almost every sector. Although there are a
wide variety of interpretations and techniques, the core principles of the
Agile Manifesto can help any organization in any industry improve their
productivity and success. The Agile Zone is your essential hub for Scrum,
XP, Kanban, Lean Startup, and more.

Getting Started With Docker
dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-with-docker-1
Teaches you typical Docker workflows, building images, creating Dockerfiles,
and includes helpful commands to easily automate infrastructure and contain
your distributed application.

DEVOPS BOOKS
The DevOps Handbook
by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John WIllis

DEVOPS PODCASTS

by Michael Hüttermann

DevOps Café
Arrested DevOps
The Food Fight Show

DevOps for Developers
Release It!: Design and Deploy
Production-Ready Software
by Michael T. Nygard

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

SPONSORED OPINION

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

It’s amazing to think of the change in economic behavior

Agile development methodologies are a step in the right

over past 20 years. In 1995—the year both Amazon and

direction. DevOps takes things one step further. But the

eBay launched—virtually all commerce was conducted in

ultimate goal of any organization should be transforming

the physical realm.

into a factory capable of continuously delivering software.

Today that’s changed. In the application economy,

Continuous delivery is not an easy task. It requires

customers’ impressions are overwhelmingly shaped by

automation throughout the software development lifecycle,

their interactions with your web and mobile applications.

as a bottleneck anywhere can back up the entire assembly

The battleground for consumer loyalty is no longer in the

line. That means development, testing and release

physical world: it takes place on your web and mobile

automation all must occur continuously—and concurrently.

apps. This means that whatever products or services your
company sells—and whether you realize it or not—your
company is in the software business.
To compete in the application economy, your organization
has to create software the way a modern factory
manufactures goods. Specifically, software needs to be
developed faster, at lower costs, and with high degree of
quality. And this is true across all virtual touchpoints: your
public-facing web and mobile apps, as well as your backend

Testing is often the last hurdle to continuous delivery,
and achieving continuous testing means shift-left testing
practices, test automation, and testing at the API level.
CA offers an open and integrated portfolio of continuous
delivery solutions that automate software delivery—
from planning through production. These solutions help
you accelerate the delivery of innovative, high-quality
applications to drive competitive advantage and win in the
application economy.

systems, are all equally critical to delivering a superior
customer experience.

WRITTEN BY BRENDAN HAYES
DIRECTOR OF DEVOPS SOLUTIONS MARKETING, CA TECHNOLOGIES

Continuous Delivery solutions By CA Technologies
Where development, testing, and release teams can work in a unique
and open integrated ecosystem with proven results.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE

STRENGTHS

DevOps and
Continuous Delivery

Continuous

Yes

• Integrated and open, end-to-end continuous
delivery ecosystem

CASE STUDY

• Develop continuously to release applications up

GM Financial, the finance arm of General Motors, was striving to deliver
applications and updates faster, to better serve its customers—and make
it easier for them to get loans. Rapid growth within in the business and
increased competition meant traditional development methods were no

to 20x faster
• Test continuously to gain up to a 25% reduction
in testing cost and time

longer keeping pace.
GM Financial recognized the need to deliver higher quality software,
faster—something that could only be achieved by automating much of

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS

the software development lifecycle.

• SunTrust

A cohesive effort spanning dev, ops, and quality assurance did just this.

• Direct Line Group

With the help of CA’s continuous delivery solutions, GM Financial was

• RaboBank

able to shorten a standard server deployment from several hours to a few
minutes. Results like this have had a direct customer-facing impact: now
loans can be processed in 1 day vs. 1-2 weeks.

• AutoTrader

Listen to their story here.

• Jewelers Mutual

BLOG blogs.ca.com

• Manheim

TWITTER @CAInc

WEBSITE ca.com/continuous-delivery

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DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

What the Military
Taught Me About
DevOps

QUICK VIEW
01

Failing fast is not unique to
DevOps but it is an incredibly
important strategy to adhere
to in DevOps

The US military has numerous
lessons learned from some of
its failures that can be brought
into the DevOps space

One nuclear mishap in 1961
demonstrates issues DevOps
engineers face today

Practicing failures and mitigating
issues as a result of those failures
should be a standard function of
DevOps teams

BY CHRIS SHORT
GLOBAL DEVOPS ENGINEER AT SOLARWINDS MSP

When we talk about failures in DevOps we

up call for the US military, who nearly bombed its own

are usually talking about how we want to fail

country. Around midnight on January 24, 1961 a B-52G

fast. What is failing fast though? The term

Stratofortress was flying a Cold War alert flight out of
Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. These

“fail fast” has several origins but the one that

alert flights were part of the US military’s answer to what

is referred to in Agile is probably the most

was believed to be a superior Soviet ballistic missile

appropriate for DevOps. Fail fast is a strategy

threat. The B-52G that took off that night in ‘61 had two
Mark 39 thermonuclear weapons on board.

in which you try something, it fails, feedback
is delivered quickly, you adapt accordingly,
and try again. Failing fast is the only way to

The Cold War was a very tenuous time in world history.
The battle over who could deploy weapons fastest
between east and west was far greater than any Vim vs.

fail in DevOps. Roll out a product, service, or

Emacs flamewar could ever hope to reach; it was almost

application quickly, and if it doesn’t pan out,

unquantifiable. The US military commanders in charge

move on quickly.

of the nuclear weapons were so afraid of not being able to
respond to an attack, that they routinely fought against
the use of safeties in nuclear weapons. We can draw a

We don’t often think of military failures in a positive
light, and rightfully so. The Battle of the Little Bighorn
did not work out well for General Custer. Operation Eagle
Claw, the aborted operation to rescue hostages in Iran,
resulted in loss of life and contributed to President Jimmy
Carter’s failed re-election bid. And a nuclear mishap
almost resulted in the creation of “a very large Bay of
North Carolina,” according to Dr. Jack ReVelle, Explosive
Ordinance Disposal officer. For the scope of this article,
we’ll focus on this near-nuclear B-52 blunder, exploring
what went wrong and applying the lessons learned from it
to our DevOps craft today.
The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash is what I consider a
near miss for humanity and a very well timed wake-

parallel here to eager investors wanting to see return
on investment or managers trying to meet unrealistic
delivery dates.
Continuing our analogy, the role of development and
operations will be played by the scientists and bomb
makers of the era, who wanted weapons to fail safely
(thus not exploding when something went wrong). The
makers wanted safe backout plans laid out as part of
the design, planning, and implementation. Meanwhile,
the investors/managers (military commanders) wanted
weapons that could be deployed quickly and cheaply.
The makers and commanders were at odds in their
philosophies. As a result, the Mark 39 bomb had safeties
disabled when the aircraft carrying them was aloft. On

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this night in 1961, the B-52G carrying these weapons

accident, I learned that significant improvements were

above Faro, North Carolina had a structural failure and

made to training and documentation. Security and

broke up in mid-air.

safety became an iterative part of the development and
deployment processes. Prior to this deployment, Dr.

The two Mark 39 bombs, clocking in at 3.8 megatons a

ReVelle was not trained in disaster recovery of nuclear

piece (more than 250 times the destructive power of the

devices, “We were writing the book on it as we went.”

Hiroshima bomb), plummeted to earth. One Mark 39

As a result of this accident, techs were taught how to

deployed its parachute (a part of a planned detonation

manage the systems before deployment. Additionally,

of the weapon) and it was later discovered that three of

documentation was updated continuously to include

the four safety mechanisms were flipped off during the

necessary information about the systems as they were

accident; one step away from a nuclear explosion. This

being developed. Better tooling was procured for the

particular bomb landed in a tree and was safely recovered.

teams to manage incidents. In short, significant rigor

The other Mark 39 bomb did not deploy its parachute.
Instead, it became a nuclear lawn dart and slammed in
to a swampy patch of earth at an estimated 700 miles
per hour breaking apart on impact. The core (or pit) of

was added to training programs, deployment plans, and
documentation processes in the EOD teams. EOD teams
now planned for failures in the way DevOps teams of
today plan for failures.

the bomb was safely recovered. A complete recovery of
all of the weapon’s components was not possible due
to the conditions. As a result, a small chunk of eastern
North Carolina has some fissile material leftover from
the accident. There is a concrete pad in place to prevent
tampering and a hastily written law that no farming or
other activity will take place deeper than five feet at the
site. There was no disaster recovery plan, and it showed.
The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 Crash is a prime example of
failing fast going wrong. We were one step away from not

“The most important part of
failing is not the fact something
failed, but how you respond to
and learn from such failures.”

one but two multi-megaton nuclear detonations on the
US eastern seaboard. The US military did not want inert
bombs to fall on the Soviet Union if a delivery system
was somehow disabled. The investors/managers wanted
the weapons to fail spectacularly. The development and

One thing you have to keep in mind about everything

operations teams wanted the weapons to fail fast and

procured by the US government is that it is delivered

safely. Investors/managers did not want to bother with

by the person or company that is the lowest bidder. In

security testing, failure scenarios, and other DevOps-type

other words, a failure rate is expected with anything. The

planning, and this nearly resulted in catastrophic costs.

military has to practice failing in any and all forms that

Luckily, for most of us following DevOps practices, we do
not have lives or the fate of humanity in our hands. We
can deploy things like Chaos Monkey in our production
environments with little risk to life and limb. If you break
something in stage, is it not doing its intended purpose:
to catch bugs safely before they manifest themselves in
production? Take advantage of your dev, test, and stage
environments. If those non-production environments are
not easily rebuilt, do the work to make them immutable.
Automate their deployment so you can take the time to
rigorously test your services. Practice failures vigorously;
spend the time needed to correct or automate issues out
of the systems.
Following the near disaster in Goldsboro, the US
government conducted an amazingly detailed
postmortem. Speaking with Dr. Jack ReVelle, the Explosive
Ordnance Disposal (EOD) officer who responded to the

can be thought of just like DevOps professionals should.
Practicing failures is important because it will improve
your recognition time and response times to these
failures. Your teams will build a sort of “muscle memory”
to effectively quash issues before they become incidents.
This “muscle memory” will allow your teams to iterate
through one scenario while discussing other scenarios
more calmly. Common sense is not common, so explicit
documentation and processes are incredibly important.
Remember, the most important part of failing is not the
fact something failed, but how you respond to and learn
from such failures.
C HR I S S HOR T has over two decades in various IT
disciplines from textile manufacturing to dial-up ISPs to DevOps
Engineer. He’s been a staunch advocate for open source
solutions throughout his time in the private and public sector. He’s a
partially disabled US Air Force Veteran living with his wife and son in NC.
Check out his writing at chrisshort.net.

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

Bridge the gap
between Dev and Ops
with Jobs-as-Code
Control-M & DevOps: Automation API
—

Bring IT to Life at bmc.com/jobsascode

SPONSORED OPINION

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

End the Hidden
Drag in Application
Delivery
DevOps is about increasing the speed of delivering high-quality
applications. However, many DevOps teams do not realize how
much time they lose dealing with the mix-and-match job scripts
that are rolling through to production.

extended to support these new initiatives. To avoid rework,
headaches, and poor quality applications, BMC is working with
Dev teams around the globe to shift-left these functions from
Ops into Dev with Jobs-as-Code. Control-M Jobs-as-Code gives
developers access to the power of Control-M by embedding job
scripts into the code. The functionality expected in production
is now delivered from development through the entire lifecycle.

70% of business processing is done by
application job scheduling. Jobs-as-Code
increases quality and shortens delivery time.

During the build phase, simple tools and manual scripts are
used to code jobs for applications. This non-standard approach
results in downstream issues when Operations goes to scale in
production. Operations teams are forced to send back to Dev or
rework the scripts so applications can run as expected. Often
this means converting scripts to comply with the enterprise job
scheduling solution. This extra effort causes unnecessary delays
in the application delivery process.

70% of business processing is done by application job
scheduling. Jobs-as-Code increases quality and shortens
delivery time (source: How to Accelerate DevOps Delivery
Cycles, 2016). Free up development time to rapidly improve
applications running in production. The result is a faster, better
DevOps delivery cycle.

With agile development and delivery top priority for companies

WRITTEN BY TINA STURGIS

worldwide, job scheduling and file transfer solutions are being

DIRECTOR, SOLUTION MARKETING AT BMC

Control-M

By BMC

“When we look at how much work we push through our environment running multiple platforms, we estimate that
we would need 30 full-time personnel working seven days a week to do the amount of work that our team of six
does with Control-M.” — DON SNIOS, SENIOR MANAGER OF OPERATIONS AND SCHEDULING, INGRAM MICRO
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE

STRENGTHS

Enterprise Job
Scheduling / Jobsas-Code

Continuous

• Jobs-as-Code helps organizations operationalize applications
faster by embedding automated job scheduling into the current
development and release process.
• Strengthen application quality by decreasing downstream

CASE STUDY
Unum, which encompasses Unum US, Colonial Life, Starmount,
and Unum UK, is a leading provider of financial protection

complexity and minimizing errors when rolling into production.
• Increase team member productivity by reducing the time spent

benefits in the workplace, including disability, life, accident,

learning a new scheduling tool for every application or manually

and critical illness coverage. The IT organization at Unum is

scripting and re-scripting jobs.

committed to putting the right technologies in place to support
the company’s growth. BMC Control-M has been part of that effort
for more than 20 years. Today, Control-M manages every aspect of
their batch processing—supporting internal business operations,
enrolling policyholders, transferring employee data reliably
among employers, Unum, and payroll providers, and processing
claims for individuals. The result has been a 60 percent reduction
in batch service requests coming into the scheduling team.
They’ve also seen a 900 percent increase in jobs submitted via
Self Service over the past 3½ years.

• Accelerate application change and deployment cycle times with
automated application workflow between test and production.
• Quickly and reliably deliver business services by easily connecting
applications and workflow processes.

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
• Eaton

• Ingram Micro

• Carfax

• British Sky
Broadcasting

• UNUM

BLOG bit.ly/2h64GBL

TWITTER @ControlM_BMC

• Raymond James
Financial

WEBSITE bmc.com/jobsascode

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Solutions Directory
This directory contains software configuration, build, container, repository, monitoring, and
application performance management tools, as well as many other tools to help you on your journey
toward Continuous Delivery. It provides the company name, product information, open source data,
and product category information gathered from vendor websites and project pages. Solutions
are selected for inclusion based on several impartial criteria, including solution maturity, technical
innovativeness, relevance, and data availability.

OPEN
SOURCE

COMPANY NAME

PRODUCT

CATEGORY

WEBSITE

Amazon

Amazon ECS

Container Management

aws.amazon.com/ecs

Apache Software Foundation

Apache Ant

Build Management

Yes

ant.apache.org

Apache Software Foundation

Apache Archiva

Repository Management

Yes

archiva.apache.org

Apache Software Foundation

Apache Maven

Build Management

Yes

maven.apache.org

Apache Software Foundation

Apache Subversion

Software Configuration Management

Yes

subversion.apache.org

Apache Software Foundation

JMeter

Web and Java Testing

Yes

jmeter.apache.org

AppDynamics

Application Performance Management

appdynamics.com

Appium

Automated Web and Mobile Testing

Yes

appium.io

Atlassian

Bamboo

Continuous Integration, Application
Release Automation

atlassian.com/software/bamboo

Attunity

RepliWeb for ARA

Application Release Automation

attunity.com/products/repliweb

Automic

Automic V12

Application Release Automation

Yes

automic.com/products/application-releaseautomation

BigPanda

Altert Correlation
Platform

Monitoring Alert Software

bigpanda.io

BMC

Control-M

Enterprise Job Scheduling

bmc.com/it-solutions/control-m.html

Buildbot

Continuous Integration

Yes

buildbot.net

CA Release Automation

Application Release Automation

Yes

ca.com/us/products/ca-release-automation.html

Chef

Chef Automate

Continuous Deployment Platform

Yes

chef.io/automate

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OPEN
SOURCE

COMPANY NAME

PRODUCT

CATEGORY

WEBSITE

Chef

Continuous Delivery

Application and Infrastructure Release
Automation

chef.io/solutions/continuous-delivery

CircleCI

Continuous Integration

circleci.com

Cloudbees

Jenkins Enterprise

Continuous Integration, Application
Release Automation

go.cloudbees.com/docs/cloudbeesdocumentation/cje-install-guide

Codeship

ParallelCI

Continuous Integration

codeship.com/features/parallelci

Cucumber

Automated Rails Testing

Yes

cucumber.io

Datadog

IT Stack Performance Management

datadoghq.com

Docker

Docker Swarm

Container Management

Yes

docker.com/products/docker-swarm

Eclipse

Hudson

Continuous Integration

Yes

eclipse.org/hudson

ElasticBox

Container Management

elasticbox.com

Electric Cloud

ElectricFlow

Application Release Automation

electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow

FitNesse

Acceptance Testing Framework

Yes

fitnesse.org

Free Software Foundation

Concurrent Versions
Systems (CVS)

Software Configuration Management

Yes

savannah.nongnu.org/projects/cvs

Git

Software Configuration Management

Yes

git-scm.com

Gitlab

GitLab

Code Review, Continuous Integration,
Continuous Delivery

Yes

about.gitlab.com

Gradle

Build Automation

Yes

gradle.org

Grid Dynamics

Agile Software Factory

Application Release Automation

griddynamics.com/blueprints

Gridlastic

Automated Web Testing

gridlastic.com

Hashicorp

Vagrant

Configuration Management

Yes

vagrantup.com

HPE

ALM Octane

Application Lifecycle Management

saas.hpe.com/en-us/software/alm-octane

IBM

Rational

Software Configuration Management

01.ibm.com/software/rational/strategy

IBM

Urbancode Build

Continuous Integration, Build
Management

developer.ibm.com/urbancode/products/
urbancode-build/

IBM

Urbancode Deploy

Application Release Automation

developer.ibm.com/urbancode/products/
urbancode-deploy

Inedo

Buildmaster

Application Release Automation

inedo.com/buildmaster

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OPEN
SOURCE

COMPANY NAME

PRODUCT

CATEGORY

WEBSITE

Inflectra

Rapise

Automated Web Testing

inflectra.com/Rapise

Jenkins

Continuous Integration

Yes

jenkins-ci.org

JetBrains

TeamCity

Continuous Integration, Application
Release Automation

jetbrains.com/teamcity

jFrog

Artifactory

Repository Management

jfrog.com/artifactory

Junit

JUnit

Unit Testing Framework

Yes

junit.org

Librato

Monitoring Alert Software

librato.com

Mercuiral

Mercurial

Software Configuration Management

Yes

mercurial-scm.org

Micro Focus

AccuRev

Software Configuration Management

microfocus.com/products/change-management/
accurev

Microsoft

Team Foundation
Server

Software Configuration Management

visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/
tfs2017-relnotes

MidVision

RapidDeploy

Application Release Automation

midvision.com/product/rapiddeploy

Nagios

Nagios Core

Infrastructure Monitoring

Yes

nagios.org/projects/nagios-core

New Relic

Application Performance Management

newrelic.com

NuGet

Repository Management

Yes

nuget.org

Nunit

NUnit

Unit Testing Framework

Yes

nunit.org

OpsGenie

Monitoring Alert Software

opsgenie.com

PagerDuty

Monitoring Alert Software

pagerduty.com

Parasoft

Automated Web and API Testing

parasoft.com

Perforce

Helix

Software Configuration Management

perforce.com/helix

Plutora

Application Release Automation

plutora.com

Puppet Labs

Puppet

Configuration Management

puppetlabs.com

Rake

Build Automation

Yes

github.com/ruby/rake

Ranorex

Automated Web and Desktop Testing

ranorex.com

Red Gate Software

DLM Automation Suite

Database CI and Release Automation

red-gate.com/products/dlm/dlm-automation

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OPEN
SOURCE

WEBSITE

Configuration Management,
Application Release Automation

Yes

ansible.com

ALM and DevOps

Application Release Automation

rocketsoftware.com/product-categories/
application-lifecycle-management-anddevops?rcid=mm-pr-alm-explore

Sahi

Automated Web Testing

sahipro.com

SaltStack

Salt

Configuration Management

Yes

saltstack.com

Sauce Labs

Automated Web and Mobile Testing

Yes

saucelabs.com

Selenium

Selenium WebDriver

Automated Web Testing

Yes

seleniumhq.org

Serena

Serena Deployment
Automation

Application Release Automation

serena.com/index.php/en/products/deploymentconfiguration-automation/serena-deploymentautomation/overview

SmartBear Software

SoapUI

Automated Web and API Testing

Yes

soapui.org

SnapCI

Continuous Integration

snap-ci.com

Solano Labs

Continuous Integration

solanolabs.com

Sonatype

Nexus

Repository Management

Yes

sonatype.org/nexus

Tellurium

Automated Web Testing

te52.com

TestingBot

Automated Web Testing

testingbot.com

TestNG

Unit Testing Framework

Yes

testng.org

The Linux Foundation

Kubernetes

Container Management

Yes

kubernetes.io

Thoughtworks

Application Release Automation

Yes

gocd.io

TravisCI

Continuous Integration

Yes

travis-ci.org

VictorOps

Monitoring Alert Software

victorops.com

Watir

Automated Web Testing

Yes

watir.com

WeaveWorks

Weave Cloud

Containers, Microservices, and SaaS

weave.works/solution/cloud

Windmill

Automated Web Testing

Yes

getwindmill.com

Xebia Labs

XL Deploy

Application Release Automation

xebialabs.com/products/xl-deploy

xUnit

Unit Testing Framework

Yes

xunit.github.io

Zend

Zend Server

Application Release Automation for
PHP

zend.com/en/products/zend_server

COMPANY NAME

PRODUCT

CATEGORY

Red Hat

Ansible

Rocket Software

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DZONE’S GUIDE TO D e v O p s : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

GLOSSARY

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION A

are derived from a model that describes

software development process where a

the functional aspects of the System Under

branch of source code is rebuilt every time

Test (SUT). Visual models can be used to

code is committed to the source control

represent the desired behavior of a SUT,

ARTIFACT Any description of a process

system. The process is often extended to

or to represent testing strategies and a

used to create a piece of software that can

include deployment, installation, and testing

test environment. From that model manual

be referred to, including diagrams, user

of applications in production environments.

tests, test data, and automated tests can be
generated automatically.

requirements, and UML models.

CONTINUOUS QUALITY A principle
AUTONOMY The ability to make changes

that preaches the continuous quest for

with the resources currently available,

quality across the entire SDLC, starting from

ONE-STOP SHOP / OUT-OF-THEBOX TOOLS Tools that provide a set of

without the need to defer to something or

requirements definition, code development,

functionalities that works immediately after

someone higher up in the hierarchy.

testing, and operations. Another key area

installation with hardly any configuration

of focus for Continuous Quality is the

or modification needs. When applied to the

application code pipeline orchestration.

software delivery, a one-stop shop solution

There are many opportunities to negatively

allows quick setup of a deployment pipeline.

BRANCHING The duplication of an object
under review in source control so that the
same code can be modified by more than
one developer in parallel.

COMMIT A way to record the changes
to a repository and add a log message to
describe the changes that were made.

COMPLEX-ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS Any
system made of a collection of similar,
smaller pieces that are dynamically
connected and can change to adapt
to changes for the benefit of a macrostructure.

CONTAINERS Resource isolation at the
OS (rather than machine) level, usually (in
UNIX-based systems) in user space. Isolated
elements vary by containerization strategy
and often include file system, disk quota, CPU
and memory, I/O rate, root privileges, and
network access. Much lighter-weight than
machine-level virtualization and sufficient for

impact the quality of an application when
code is being manually moved across

PAIR PROGRAMMING A software

environments.

development practice where two developers
work on a feature, rather than one, so that

CONTINUOUS TESTING The process

both developers can review each others’

of executing unattended automated tests

code as it’s being written in order to

as part of the software delivery pipeline

improve code quality.

across all environments to obtain immediate
feedback on the quality of a code build.

PRODUCTION The final stage in a
deployment pipeline where the software will

DEPLOYMENT PIPELINE A deployment

be used by the intended audience.

pipeline is an automated manifestation of
your process for getting software from

SOURCE CONTROL A system for storing,

version control into the hands of your users.

tracking, and managing changes to

(source: informIT.com)

software. This is commonly done through
a process of creating branches (copies for

DEVOPS An IT organizational

safely creating new features) off of the

methodology where all teams in the

stable master version of the software and

organization, especially development teams

then merging stable feature branches back

and operations teams, collaborate on both

into the master version. This is also known

development and deployment of software

as version control or revision control.

to increase software production agility and
achieve business goals.

many isolation requirement sets.

STAGING ENVIRONMENT Used to test
the newer version of your software before

EVENT-DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE A

it’s moved to live production. Staging is

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY A software

software architecture pattern where events

meant to replicate as much of your live

engineering approach in which continuous

or messages are produced by the system,

production environment as possible, giving

integration, automated testing, and

and the system is built to react, consume,

you the best chance to catch any bugs

automated deployment capabilities allow

and detect other events.

before you release your software.

rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly with minimal

FAIL FAST A strategy in which you try

TECHNICAL DEBT A concept in

human intervention.

something, it fails, feedback is delivered

programming that reflects the extra

quickly, you adapt accordingly, and try again.

development work that arises when code

software to be developed and deployed

that is easy to implement in the short run is

CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT A software
development practice in which every code

MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE The

used instead of applying the best

change goes through the entire pipeline

practice of developing software as

overall solution.

and is put into production automatically,

an interconnected system of several

resulting in many production deployments

independent, modular services that

TEST AUTOMATION The use of special

every day. It does everything that

communicate with each other.

software (separate from the software being

Continuous Delivery does, but the process
is fully automated, and there’s no human
intervention at all.

tested) to control the execution of tests and

MODEL-BASED TESTING A software

the comparison of actual outcomes with

testing technique in which the test cases

predicted outcomes.

DZONE’S GUIDE TO D ev O ps : CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & AUTOMATION, VOLUME IV

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Dzone Guide To Dev Ops Volume IV

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