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Finding the right Agile formula: Making CI, CT and CD work together

In today’s world of Agile, we know that development teams must offer products and services to end users on their terms, on their choice of devices, and at their convenience – creating and differentiating features that work perfectly regardless of how much time they have to build and release the new software. At the end of the day, this combination of velocity and quality can be make or break for brands, but achieving it is no easy feat.

We believe that teams which are trying to mature their DevOps practices, but facing hurdles, should consider the combination of the ‘Three Cs’: continuous integration, continuous testing and continuous delivery in their workflows. By automating all release activities, teams can assure high quality deliverables throughout each stage of the DevOps pipeline, raising the confidence of flawless release time after time.

Although they serve slightly different objectives, the ‘Three Cs’ can actually integrate to assist teams in meeting their primary goals: speed and quality. But, determining how to combine these three methods into the right formula is crucial, and for many that’s the challenging bit.

Defining the methods

Before we consider how these practices can work together, we should address some confusion still in the market – and take a quick look at what each of these methods really means.

Continuous integration: The most dominant player in the ‘Three Cs’ is Continuous integration (CI) and it’s a necessary approach for any Agile team. CI requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

By integrating regularly, teams can detect errors quickly, and locate them more easily. Simply, it ensures bugs are caught earlier in the development cycle, which makes them less expensive to fix – and maintains a consistent quality.

Continuous delivery: Continuous delivery is the practice of streamlining/automating all the processes leading up to deployment. This includes many steps, such as validating the quality of the build in the previous environment (ex.: dev environment), promoting to staging, etc. These steps, done manually, can take significant effort and time. Using cloud technologies and proper orchestration, they can be automated.

Teams should ensure they have a monitoring dashboard for your production environment in place in order to eliminate performance bottlenecks and respond fast to issues. This will complete an efficient CD process.

Continuous testing: Continuous testing (CT), which can also be referred to as Continuous Quality, is the practice of embedding and automating test activities into every “commit”. CT helps developers use their time more efficiently when trying to fix a bug for code that was written years ago. To fix the bug, developers should first remind themselves of which code it was, undo any code that was written on top of the original code, and then re-test the new code; not a short process. Testing that takes place every commit, every few hours, nightly and weekly, not only increases confidence in the application quality, it also drives team efficiency.

Working together

These three processes are often viewed as distinctly separate identities, fighting for the top spot in the DevOps pipeline. However, we’d argue that the ‘Three Cs’ together are important to the success of one another throughout the delivery cycle, and it’s only by incorporating the CI/CD/CT trifecta that teams will be able to achieve the velocity and quality they need.

But with distinct personalities and separate jobs to do, how can DevOps teams bring these functions together and ensure a smooth running, fully integrated, team?

First, it’s important to understand how each function plays into the others. For example, for CI to be successful, you need to ensure tests are stable and run continuously and in a stable environment –  which in turn ensures high reliability of the test results per each build execution. The same goes for CT; to have an engine that can trigger tests automatically requires robust test code, a robust test lab, and most-importantly, cultural and team synchronisation. When both CI and CT are working for you, that means that you are that close to a working CD.

We also believe that there are three key characteristics that teams must have to make the trifecta of CI, CT and CD work together. The first is communication. Communication between team members is vital, and this is something that CI enables. CI allows teams to be Agile, by ensuring teams are all on the same page, despite leaving a project or moving on to a different step in the process, teams can easily integrate once they return, without having to start over from page one.

The second key characteristic is trust – CD alleviates any unknowns by automating and streamlining all the processes leading up to deployment, such as validating the quality of the build in the previous environment and promoting to staging. And third is honesty. If teams leverage CT when developing apps in different environments and with different criteria, it will prevent larger issues from happening once the app is in the sprint, or live, keeping developers honest about the status of their code.

Conclusion

So, we can clearly see the benefits of adopting the Three Cs – and by establishing open lines of communication, and ensuring teams know how each function plays into the other, DevOps can establish a seamless development workflow. And, of course, it’s crucial incorporate CI, CD and CT throughout the entire SDLC to keep deployments moving – and to achieve the velocity of release and application quality which ultimately keeps consumers happy.

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Connecting Your iPhone to Your Windows 10 VM

The Windows 10 Spring Creators Update was released on April 10, 2018, and it has a number of new features that Mac users will care about. This is the first in a short series about these new Windows 10 features: Connecting your iPhone to your Windows 10 VM. Microsoft has long been accused of copying […]

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HPE acquires RedPixie to encourage enterprise workload migrations


Clare Hopping

11 Apr, 2018

HPE has announced the acquisition of cloud consulting and migration firm RedPixie, which it will absorb into its existing advisory and professional services business, which falls within the HPE Pointnext services division.

The purchase means HPE will be able to offer its customers a greater range of cloud consulting, application development and migration services for its hybrid, private, managed, and public cloud customer, helping them transition to the cloud.

«At HPE Pointnext, we always begin by understanding our customers’ digital transformation ambitions and organizing ourselves around their desired outcomes,» Ana Pinczuk, HPE Pointnext’s global leader said in a blog post.

«With this acquisition, we will continue to expand our comprehensive hybrid IT portfolio and will be even better positioned to help our customers build new digital experiences and drive better business outcomes now and into the future.»

HPE has already bought Cloud Technology Partners to service the customers using AWS, while this newest acquisition will ensure it has the Microsoft Azure base covered, with Microsoft’s cloud RedPixie’s main business. Although it’s yet to announce a third acquisition to cover the Google slice, it seems pretty likely the company is on the lookout for someone to service those customers.

«Some workloads are best suited to the public cloud, some should live in a private cloud environment and others need to stay in traditional on-premises infrastructure,» Pinczuk said. «Finding the right mix will enable businesses to analyze data quickly, efficiently manage workloads and ultimately accelerate business outcomes by driving new business models, creating new customer and employee experiences, and improving operational performance.»

HPE scrapped its own public cloud service a few years ago, so it makes sense to ensure it can keep those using alternative clouds happy. Neither company has revealed what will happen to RedPixie’s employees or its customers, although it’s likely the latter will also be absorbed into HPE’s business.

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Google achieves 100% renewable energy target – becoming first public cloud to do so

Google has touted itself as the first public cloud provider to run all its clouds on renewable energy.

The company, which says it is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world – almost three times as much as Amazon and Microsoft, its primary cloud rivals – has been working to attain this goal for the best part of a decade.

With the belief that 2017 would be the year the ‘road to 100%’ would be completed, the company ramped up its efforts. 2016 saw Google’s operational projects cover almost three fifths (57%) of the energy used from global utilities. With the addition of a record number of new contracts for wind and solar developments still under construction, it enabled the company to surpass the 100% total.

“Over the course of 2017, across the globe, for every kilowatt hour of electricity we consumed, we purchased a kilowatt hour of renewably energy from a wind or solar farm that was built specifically for Google,” wrote Urs Hölzle, Google technical infrastructure senior vice president in a blog post. “This makes us the first public cloud, and company of our size, to have achieved this feat.”

Hölzle added that plans will only escalate in future months and years with new data centre and office openings. In February, Google CEO Sundar Pichai outlined expansion plans for Google’s data centres in the US, having attended the groundbreaking for the outlet in Clarksville/Montgomery County in Tennessee. Pichai noted the importance of renewable energy generation in data centre building and maintenance.

“People often discuss ‘the cloud’ as if it’s built out of air – but it’s actually made up of buildings, machinery, and people who construct and manage it all,” Pichai wrote at the time. “Today we employ an estimated 1,900 people directly on our data centre campuses. We’ve created thousands of construction jobs – both for our data centres themselves, and for renewable energy generation.

“Our renewable energy purchasing commitments to date will result in energy infrastructure investments of more than $3.5 billion globally – about two thirds of that in the United States,” Pichai added.

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How converged systems revenue has reached $12.5 billion

Worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 9.1 percent year-over -year to $3.6 billion during the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Full-year sales surpassed $12.5 billion in 2017, representing a 9.4 percenet increase over the previous year and the first time the market surpassed $12 billion in a calendar year.

Converged systems market development

"The number of organizations deploying converged systems continued to expand through 2017," said Eric Sheppard, research vice president at IDC.

Growing demand drove the total market value. While not all market segments increased during the year, those that did grow were able to provide considerable benefits related to the most core infrastructure challenges facing today's data centers.

IDC's converged systems market view offers three segments: certified reference systems & integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms, and hyperconverged systems. Certified reference systems & integrated infrastructure are pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment, and basic element or systems management software.

Integrated platforms are integrated systems that are sold with additional pre-integrated packaged software and customized system engineering optimized to enable such functions as application development software, databases, testing, and integration tools. Hyperconverged systems collapse core storage and compute functionality into a single, highly virtualized solution.

A key characteristic of hyperconverged systems that differentiate these solutions from other integrated systems is their scale-out architecture and their ability to provide all compute and storage functions through the same x86 server-based resources. Market values for all three segments includes hardware and software but excludes services and support.

The certified reference systems & integrated infrastructure market generated $1.7 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, which represents a 3.4 percent year-over-year decline and 47.1 percent of the total converged systems market value.

Revenue from hyperconverged systems sales grew 69.4 percent year over year to $1.25 billion during the fourth quarter of 2017. This amounted to 34.3 percent of the total converged systems market. Full-year sales of hyperconverged systems surpassed $3.7 billion in 2017 — that's up by 64.3 percent from 2016.

Integrated platforms sales declined 18.1 percent year over year during the fourth quarter of 2017, generating revenues of $675.5 million. This amounted to 18.6 percent of the total converged systems market value.

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How to Easily Optimize Parallels Desktop for Mac

With millions of users around the world, Parallels Desktop® for Mac has been a popular Mac application for more than a decade. To serve the specific needs of this large user base, over the years we have added preferences and settings to Parallels Desktop—lots of preference and settings. This has resulted in an application that […]

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Pivotal launches IPO


Clare Hopping

10 Apr, 2018

Dell’s Pivotal offshoot has launched its IPO, with an anticipated share value of up to $592 million (£420 million) if its 37 million Class A shares sell for the estimated $14 (£10) to $16 (£11) per share. It will also free up 5.6 million more shares for its underwriters to buy if it takes their fancy.

The company will trade under the ticker symbol “PVTL” with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup leading the sales. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse, RBC Capital Markets, UBS Investment Bank and Wells Fargo Securities are also involved as book-running managers.

Pivotal filed for IPO back in March and although its major motivation behind going public is to raise some desperately needed funds to stop it being sold, Dell will keep its controlling share through its other subsidiary companies such as VMware.

If Pivotal doesn’t raise the capital needed to bring it back from the edge, Dell may be forced to sell it, as the giant hopes to claw back some money from its rather large splurge on EMC two years ago. Pivotal posted a net loss of $163.5 million (£116 million) last financial year, which although is an improvement on its previous year’s losses of $232.9 million (£165 million), it’s still not as buoyant as Dell would like.

Another option for Dell is to de-merge with VMware, although the company denied that was an option back in February.

Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought the software firm back in 2013 for a cool $25 billion (£18 billion), although alongside its purchase of EMC, it left the company in $38 billion (£27 billion) up to February this year.

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Move over VMs, the future of app deployment is in containers


Davey Winder

10 Apr, 2018

Containerisation is fast becoming one of the most popular methods of deploying applications in a virtual environment, and is widely considered to be making ‘virtual machines’ a thing of the past.

Yet what exactly are containers and why should you bother moving from a tried and trusted VM?

Containers? You mean like boxes for moving our computer gear?

Not exactly – we’re not talking about packaging up physical appliances here. But in the IT operational sense, containers are pretty much the same idea, only for applications. Docker, which is the best-known proponent of the technology, defines a container as a «lightweight, standalone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings».

Is ‘container’ just a fashionable term for VM?

Containers and virtual machines do share some similarities, particularly to do with resource isolation. But they’re not the same thing. A virtual machine is primarily an abstraction of a hardware platform – an approach that makes it easy to turn one physical server into lots of independent virtual ones. In a setup like this, each VM runs its own operating system and application stack.

Containers, by contrast, focus on virtualising an operating environment. Multiple containers can run concurrently under a single OS, just like regular applications. It’s a more efficient technology, and much more portable.

And we need this why, exactly?

Containers are tremendously useful when it comes to moving software between different computing environments – for example, moving an application from testing into production, or from physical hardware into the cloud.

You can be confident that things will continue to work as expected, even if the supporting software environment has a completely different network topology, security policy or hardware configuration. And since containers don’t require a complete OS installation, you can fit more containerised apps than VMs onto a single server.

So containers are only good for porting applications?

Containers are also very useful for development. They’re a great fit for the microservices, modular way of doing things. The key is that you don’t need to run everything within a single container: you can connect together multiple containers to build an application out of known quantities.

This is a huge help when it comes to management and development, as individual modules can be updated individually – and it’s efficient too, as each container is only initiated (in an almost instant, «just in time» fashion) when it’s needed.

That sounds good. But do we have to tie ourselves to Docker?

Not at all – containers have been built directly into Linux for years now, under the umbrella of the LXC user space interface for kernel containment features (you can read more on this here). Another free, open source container system is Kubernetes. However, if flexibility and support are priorities, Docker is probably the biggest and best-known cross-platform container technology vendor.

Will we be locking ourselves into the framework we choose?

You’re right to raise the question: app container images can be proprietary. For example, Docker and CoreOS have had differing specifications in the past. However, since 2015 the Linux Foundation’s Open Container Initiative (OCI) has been working on a standard container format. Both Docker and CoreOS are sponsors, along with the likes of AWS, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. So things are only going to get easier.

So are containers more secure than VMs?

One aspect of container technology that seems to cause endless debate is security. The concern is that, because multiple containers can run on one host platform, a single compromise could affect a whole stack of containers. That’s less of a concern with virtual machines, since each one is completely isolated from the other VMs running on the same hardware. What’s more, hypervisors don’t expose the entire functionality of the Linux kernel, so the attack surface of a VM is smaller, which again reduces the risk.

But containers have security strengths too. The model allows for a microservices approach, which modularises an application into a well-defined interface and limited package services – making it hard for anything to slip through the cracks.

Containers can also be scanned on access, and network segmentation can be used to isolate application clusters. In all, a well configured, properly deployed container should be just as secure as a virtual machine; the only catch is that you need to ensure that your containers meet those standards.

So, the big question: how do we get management to buy in?

As we’ve mentioned, containers can save money versus virtual machines, as the hardware demands are lesser. There’s also the potential for quicker deployment: when you need to roll out application updates, it’s much easier to replace a few containers than to update an entire virtual machine.

Containers also bring flexibility to the party: your developers can write in almost any language, and deploy painlessly to both Windows and Linux, so they’re not wasting time adapting to the idiosyncrasies of your environment. And, of course, since test, staging and deployment environments are identical, bugs are much less likely to make it into the final production code.

Should we just ditch our VMs and switch entirely to containers?

If you need to run a big stack of apps on a modest allocation of resources then containers probably make more sense than VMs. But even the container vendors admit that virtualisation and containers work best when used together.

One option is to run your containers within VMs: this provides even better isolation and better security, as well as allowing you to easily manage your virtual hardware infrastructure management – so for many scenarios it’s the best of both worlds.

Image: Shutterstock

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Office 365 outage: Users struggle to sign in


Gabriella Buckner

9 Apr, 2018

Microsoft said it has fixed an Office 365 outage across Europe that angered thousands of users last Friday.

The outage hit the UK around 9am BST, creating login and server connection failures that stopped users from signing into the 365 portal and accessing services.

DownDetector, which allows people to log technical issues with various services, said 44% of those reporting problems with 365 said they were unable to log in, with the issue particularly affecting the UK, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Customers on Twitter said they were unable to send or receive emails and could only log in to certain interfaces – or none at all.

Redmond’s Office 365 Status page on Twitter told followers they should check the preliminary Post Incident Report (PIR) under MO133518, but tweeters quickly pointed out that they could not log in to the admin centre to find out why they couldn’t log in in the first place.

Microsoft said it had «completed all recovery actions related to MO133518 and this issue is fully resolved as of Friday, April 6, 2018, at 11:30 AM UTC [12.30pm BST]. Thanks to everyone who confirmed service restoration.»

However, this stirred up outrage among users on Twitter, who bombarded Microsoft about persisting outages in London, Singapore, Australia, and many other locations.

One commenter said: «Microsoft, please don’t try to sweep this under the carpet and treat the issue as resolved.»

Another complained: «After so many hours no update!!! Please do what you promised to your client next time.»

As Office 365 returned to some businesses, Microsoft added later that day that it was not aware of any other issues with the service. It plans to publish a full report into the issue within five days of the incident. 

Pete Banham, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast, claimed the incident demonstrates that businesses shouldn’t rely on any one cloud.

«Microsoft Office 365 was hit with major downtime on Friday, with customers around the world unable to access their services or admin portals,» he said. «An operational dependency on the Microsoft environment creates business risks that need be addressed. Anyone outsourcing a critical service like email needs to consider who will suffer most from reputational damage, internal operational issues and financial loss. Mimecast is urging organisations to consider a cyber resilience strategy that assures the ability to recover and continue with business as usual.»

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Alibaba Cloud expands to Turkey with new partnership

Alibaba’s cloud expansion continues: the company has announced an expansion into Turkey alongside E-Glober.

E-Glober, the only authorised agent and business partner of Alibaba.com in Turkey, will provide their local connections and insights with Alibaba Cloud’s global infrastructure to ‘provide a compelling offering to meet the digitalisation and international expansion needs of local companies’, as the press materials put it.

Alibaba is pushing its Elastic Compute Service (ECS) with this, citing an IDC study which found the public cloud market was worth almost $97 million in 2017. The company also sees Turkey as a ‘gateway’ nation between the East and the West.

Last month, Alibaba Cloud opened data centre facilities in Indonesia, while in February the company chose Mobile World Congress – its stand proclaiming the company was the fastest growing cloud provider in the world – as the basis for several pieces of Europe-focused product news. These included announcements around infrastructure, big data and artificial intelligence (AI), and a hybrid cloud services platform.  

“Alibaba Cloud has always been dedicated to making our future-proof technology inclusive within the markets in which we operate,” said Yeming Wang, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global in a statement. “We aim to become the preferred cloud service provider for all sizes of business in Turkey by providing a full range of cloud solutions and combining this with E-Glober’s local expertise.

“Working with knowledgeable and well-connected local partners such as E-Glober will help mitigate language and cultural barriers, as well as reinforce Alibaba Cloud’s foothold within the market when it comes to helping Turkish companies internationalise and seize opportunities in this digital age,” he added.