Top 3 DevOps Categories Every Organization Should Focus On
As businesses embrace microservices and cloud-native architectures, DevOps stands at the center, helping businesses efficiently manage IT workloads. DevOps is an innovative methodology that integrates development, operations, security and business teams to seamlessly coordinate and deliver quality products faster and better. From planning and development to delivery and operations, DevOps works right through the entire application lifecycle.
DevOps brings developers and operations together so that the code is automatically build, tested and deployed in a continuous model. It uses a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline with automation incorporated across the product lifecycle to accelerate the development process and improve efficiencies while reducing costs.
A CI/CD pipeline comprises a series of steps involved in the delivery process of quality software. It includes the following steps:
- Build Phase: The application code is build and compiled here
- Test Phase: The compiled code is tested here
- Release Phase: The code is pushed to the repository
- Deploy Phase: Code is deployed to production
While DevOps offers amazing benefits to IT teams, many organizations fail to leverage it owing to a lack of understanding of this methodology. Understanding different categories of DevOps and implementing the right tool stack is important. Here are 3 important DevOps categories every organization should focus on.
1) Software DevOps
Software DevOps is where the core software is developed. It involves planning the design, assigning tasks to the team and creating artefacts using tools such as coding software, integrated development environment (IDE), version control system, testing framework and issue management.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Developers use a text editor to write, debug and edit code. However, an IDE comes with much more features than a text editor offers. Along with an editor, the IDE offers debugging and compilation enabling you to build, test and deploy code from a single dashboard. Choosing the right IDE improves productivity, reduces errors and eases the development process. While choosing an IDE, ensure that it can be integrated with services across the DevOps lifecycle. Visual Studio, IntelliJ and Eclipse are some of the popular IDEs available in the market.
Version Control System: When multiple developers work on a software project, keeping track of code changes becomes a critical requirement. A version control system helps you to keep track of each code change and revert to a specific version when a release crashes. Git is the most popular VCS system. CVS, Mercurial and SVN are other options available in this segment.
Testing Framework: A testing framework offers a set of guidelines to design and run test cases using the best testing tools and practices.
Issue Management: It is a process of identifying system-level conflicts and defects in the workflow based on events or metrics. It involves detection, response, resolution and analysis.
To achieve continuous delivery, it is important to choose the right CI/CD tools and implement automation wherever possible. Here are a few best tools for software DevOps:
Jenkins:
Jenkins is an open-source CI server tool that comes free of cost. It supports Linux, Windows and macOS platforms as well as major programming languages. The main advantage of Jenkins is its plug-in repository. You can find a plugin for most of the development tasks. Moreover, it can be easily integrated with other CI/CD platforms. Debugging is easy. However, it is important to check if the plug-ins are updated. Another downside is the lack of a user-friendly UI. It has a learning curve concerning the installation and configuration of the tool.
Github Actions
Github Actions is a CI/CD platform that enables developers to directly manage workflows in their Github repository. As such, you can perform repository-related tasks in a single place. It offers multiple CI templates. Github Actions comes with 2000 build minutes free per month.
GitLab
GitLab is a CI software developed by GitLab Inc. for managing DevOps environments. It is a web-based repository that enables administrators to perform DevOps tasks such as planning, source code management, operations, monitoring and security while facilitating seamless coordination between various teams through the product lifecycle. This platform was written in Ruby and launched in 2014 as a source code management tool. Within a quick time, it evolved as a platform that covers the entire DevOps product lifecycle. It comes with an open-core license which means the core functionality is open-source and free but additional functionalities come with a proprietary license.
AWS Code Pipeline
AWS CodePipeline is a powerful DevOps product from AWS that enables developers to automate and manage the entire product lifecycle. The tool automatically creates a build, runs the required tests to launch an app whenever a code change is detected. It offers an intuitive GUI dashboard to efficiently monitor and manage workflow configurations within the pipeline. As AWS CodePipeline is tightly integrated with other AWS services such as S3, Lambda or 3rd party services such as Jenkins, it becomes easy to create quality software faster and better. You can simply pull code from S3 and deploy it to Elastic Beanstalk or Codedeploy.
2) Infrastructure DevOps
Infrastructure management is another crucial component of a DevOps environment. With the advent of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), managing the infrastructure became simple, cost-effective and risk-free. Infrastructure as Code is an IT method of provisioning and managing infrastructure resources via config files, treating infrastructure as software. IaC enables administrators and developers to automate resource provisioning instead of manually configuring hardware. Once the hardware is transformed into software, it can be versioned, rollback and reused.
The advent of Ruby on Rails and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006 enabled businesses to scale cloud resources on-demand. However, the massive growth in web components and frameworks posed severe scalability challenges as administrators struggled to version and manage dynamically changing infrastructure configurations. By treating infrastructure as code, organizations were able to create, deploy and manage infrastructure using the same software tools and best practices. It allowed rapid deployment of applications.
IaC can be implemented using two models namely Declarative Configuration and Imperative configuration. In a declarative approach, the configuration is defined in a declarative model that shows how the infrastructure should be while the Imperative model defines steps to reach the desired state. Terraform and AWS CloudFormation are the two most popular IaC tools that enable organizations to automatically provision infrastructure using code.
Infrastructure as Code took infrastructure management to the next level. Firstly, it rightly fits into the DevOps CI/CD pipeline. The ability to use the same version control system, testing frameworks and other services of the CI/CD pipeline facilitates seamless coordination between various teams and faster time to market while significantly reducing costs. It also helps organizations leverage the containerization technology wherein the underlying infrastructure is abstracted at the OS level, and the hardware and OS are automatically provisioned. As such, containers running on top of it can be seamlessly deployed and moved across a wide variety of environments.
Secondly, IaC offers speed and efficiency with infrastructure automation. It is not confined to compute resources but extends to network, storage, databases and IAM policies as well. The best thing about IaC is that you can automatically terminate resources when they are not in use. Thirdly, IaC reduces operational costs as the number of network and hardware engineers required at every step of operations is reduced. Fourthly, it brings consistency across all deployments as config files use a VCS as a single source of truth. Scalability and availability are improved. Monitoring the performance and identifying issues at a granular level helps reduce downtimes while increasing operational efficiencies. Overall, it improves the efficiency of the entire software development lifecycle.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source IaC tool developed by Hashicorp in 2014. Written in Go language, Terraform uses Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define the desired state of the target infrastructure on a variety of platforms including Windows, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and OpenBSD. Terraform is a declarative-based tool that stores the state of the infrastructure using a custom JSON format along with details of which resources should be configured and how. The tool uses ‘Modules’ to abstract infrastructure into sharable and reusable code. HCL is human-readable and helps you quickly build infrastructure code. Terraform is cloud-agnostic and integrates well with AWS. So, it can be used to manage a variety of cloud environments.
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is a managed IaC service from AWS that helps you to create and manage AWS resources using simple text files. Along with JSON template format, YAML is supported. AWS constantly updates the tool to always keep it current while adding several new features regulalry. Nested stacks is a useful feature that encapsulates logical functional areas which makes it easy to manage complex stacks. Similarly, changesets is another useful feature that allows you to inspect changes before applying them. However, CloudFormation is native to AWS. If your infrastructure is AWS-heavy, CloudFormation will serve a great purpose.
3) Database DevOps
DevOps is not just confined to development and operations. Database DevOps extends DevOps capabilities to databases as well, integrating development teams with database administrators (DBAs) such that database code is also included with the software code. As such, database changes can be efficiently monitored and added to the DevOps workflows.
In a traditional development environment, changes made to an application often require changes to be made to the corresponding database. Developers wait for DBAs to make changes to databases that are stored in SQL scripts. These changes have to be reviewed before deploying data to production. As the review is done at the later phase of the workflow, the delay impacts the overall agility and productivity of the project. Errors identified just before a release can be risky and costly as well.
Database DevOps introduces a version control system for database changes. The source control allows you to run builds anytime and roll back if needed at your pace. It also offers an audit trail.
In database DevOps, database workflows are also integrated into the CI/CD pipeline with automation incorporated wherever possible. When a database code change is detected, the system automatically triggers a build. As such, database teams can closely work with other teams on code changes using a well-defined process to improve productivity while reducing task switching.
However, continuous deployment is not easy with regard to databases. When a code change triggers a change to the database schema, it should be migrated to a new structure. You need the right tools to do so. Snowchange is a powerful DevOps database tool that helps you in this regard.
SnowChange
SnowChange is a powerful DevOps database tool developed by James Weakly in 2018 to manage Snowflake objects such as tables, stored procedures and views. Written in Python, Snowchange fits easily into the DevOps CI/CD pipeline as all popular CI/CD tools offer a hosted agent for Python. It is a lightweight tool that follows an imperative approach to DCM (Database migration, schema change and schema migration). It uses a snowchange change script that contains SQL statements defining the state of the database. By looping target databases, the tool applies new changes to the required databases.
Sqitch, Flyway and Liquibase are a few other options in the DevOps database stack.
DevOps is a blanket term that deals with managing an entire product lifecycle. However, it is important to optimize every phase of the DevOps workflow. Choosing the right tool stack for the right process is the key to fully leveraging DevOps.
Confused about various tools, processes and configurations. Not to worry anymore. CloudTern is here to help. As an experienced DevOps company, CloudTern helps you in designing and implementing the right tool stack for your DevOps projects.
Call us right now to master DevOps!
Top 5 Benefits of Software Development Outsourcing to India
As the entire business world is moving towards digital transformation, every company, regardless of the nature of business, has to manage an IT department. While IT-related firms have the expert staff and resources to build and manage business operations, non-IT companies struggle to be on par with dynamically changing technologies. Procurement, maintenance and upgrading of hardware infrastructure is a challenge. Hiring the right talent and training them adds up to this challenge. When the IT teams are overburdened, it reflects in the quality of the software. The best way to get quality software is to outsource the job to an expert software company. Outsourcing software development helps companies to cut costs, get talented professionals onboard, leverage the latest technological innovations while being able to focus on their core operations.
Software development can be outsourced to three types of companies:
Onshore Companies: Companies that are located in the same country as the outsourcing company.
Nearshore Companies: Companies that are not located in the same country but are within the geographical location of the outsourcing company.
Offshore Companies: Companies that are located outside the geographical location of the outsourcing company.
When it comes to outsourcing software, India is the best choice. Here are the top 5 benefits of software development outsourcing to India.
1) A Highly Talented Pool of Professionals
While there are millions of offshore companies across the globe, India ranks at the top for a big reason. The country possesses a vast pool of highly talented IT professionals. The software infrastructure landscape is well developed. In addition, high-speed internet connections are available across the country. Indian IT professionals have expertise in all types of programming languages including but not limited to Python, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Kotlin, C#, .NET and Swift Be it cloud computing, DevOps, Artificial Intelligence, Infrastructure as Code or AR/VR, every technological innovation is quickly adapted here. It is not a surprise to note that CEOs of several IT giants such as Google, Microsoft and IBM hail from India.
2) Flexible Time Zone
Another advantage for India is the time zone. India is 9-12 hours ahead of US time zones, 5-6 hours ahead of UK time zones, 5-6 hours behind Australian time zones etc. This difference in the time zone enables companies in the USA to run their operations 24/7. While the company runs in the daytime, the outsourced company works at night. On a quick deadline, you can prepare the guidelines in the daytime and get it ready by the time you come to the office the next morning. If you implement a hybrid approach wherein the local IT staff works in the day and the outsourced team works in the night, your business is always in operation, 24/7. This advantage translates into faster time to market and reduced development costs.
3) Reduced Costs
The average salary of a software engineer in the US is $119,130 per year as per Indeed. Additionally, you have to provide cash bonuses, healthcare and insurance benefits and other perks every year. Infrastructure costs, hardware and software installation, maintenance, software license etc. add up to the burden. In addition, you need to train and manage employees while complying with labour regulations
On the other hand, the average salary of a software engineer in India is $10,810, as reported by Glassdoor. When you outsource software projects to India, you don’t have to go through the cumbersome process of recruitment that involves huge salaries, healthcare and insurance benefits, paid and sick leaves etc. You just pay the agreed amount. While you get your work done at reduced costs, you don’t have to compromise on the quality.
4) Communication Matters
One of the biggest challenges for businesses while outsourcing projects is the language. For seamless coordination and communication across the teams, a common language is a crucial requirement. When it comes to India, most software developers are well versed in the English language and regularly use a variety of communication tools for interacting with internal staff and geographically distributed teams.
5) Supportive Government Policies
The Indian government recognizes the software industry as one of the most important verticals. The government passed the IT Acts 2000 bill that enabled several startups to launch their projects and successfully move ahead. The government is constantly improving IT policies and coming up with strategies to strengthen the IT sector in the country. ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ are a couple of initiatives that boost the IT infrastructure in India. With tax-related benefits, encouraging incentives, e-filing of docs and other supportive measures, the government supported the industry greatly. As such, the software market earned a revenue of $4 billion within the first half of 2020. Gartner reports that the Indian IT market is expected to touch $16.9 billion by 2025. It means your software projects are being built in the best environment.
Software technology is rapidly innovating. As such, it is not feasible for businesses to learn and adapt to quickly changing trends. The best way is to outsource your software projects to India. Not only do you receive quality apps on time but you also save huge money. Most importantly, you can sit back and relax with peace of mind that helps you to focus on incorporating quality into your core operations.
Digital transformation in Healthcare – Everything You Need to Know
The entire business world is going through a digital transformation. While organizations that were encouraged by the benefits offered by digital technologies embarked on this journey first, others were forced to move digital, owing to the pandemic that brought the unexpected lockdown. While the healthcare segment was slow to adopt digital technologies owing to the lack of expertise to decide on where to invest and how to invest, the recent trends reveal that healthcare institutions are now aggressively embracing digital transformation.
What is Digital Transformation in Healthcare?
Digital transformation in healthcare is about implementing digital technologies to improve healthcare operations, increase patient experience while making healthcare cost-effective and accessible to everywhere, on-demand. Right from online appointments to managing EHRs and medicine reports to integrating various departments for seamless coordination, digital transformation makes healthcare services efficient, easy to use and accessible everywhere.
According to Global Market Insights, the global digital healthcare market was valued at $141.8 billion in 2020. This value is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.4% between 2021 and 2028. Similarly, Grand View Research reports that the global healthcare market earned a revenue of $96.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.1% during the period 2021-2028. These numbers speak volumes of the growing popularity of digital transformation in recent times.
How Digital Transformation Helps Healthcare?
Digital transformation is not a silver bullet that can simply transform existing healthcare institutions. It requires proper planning and implementation. Organizations that have rightly implemented digital technologies are reaping the following benefits:
Centralized Data Management Systems
Gone are the days when patients had to wait in long queues to meet a doctor, undergo tests/scans and return to join the long queues for treatment. With digital technologies incorporated across the organization, patients can now schedule an appointment from the comfort of their homes and get treatment at their convenience. With a single digital ID, doctors can pull out the records of the patient and check out the illness history. Similarly, the diagnostics department staff can retrieve the patient details and update them with the test reports so that the doctor can prescribe the right medicine which is then passed on to the pharmacy wing. With a centralized data management system, concerned people across the healthcare can access the required patient information and deliver quality care. Patient care becomes quick, easy and accessible for everyone.
Patient Portals
A patient portal is an intuitive online healthcare platform that enables patients to access their medical records, communicate with healthcare professionals, receive telemedicine etc. It enables them to access the data from anywhere, any location on-demand and share the test reports and case histories with multiple healthcare providers, gaining better control over the treatment.
Virtual Treatment / Video Call
Today, patients don’t have to visit a healthcare professional for regular sicknesses. Instead, they can contact a medical practitioner via a video call and get their illness treated over the phone. Whether you are in the office, at home or on the road, it is a breeze to search for a healthcare professional and communicate with them on a video call. It is especially useful in rural areas wherein healthcare services are scarce. It means digital transformation extends healthcare to most rural parts of the country. Virtual treatment has helped several patients during the time of Covid. While these options don’t negate direct visitations, they help you in times of health emergencies.
Wearable Technology
Wearable medical devices are on the rise in recent times. With the help of wearable devices, patients can keep track of high-risk conditions and prevent a health upset. For instance, you can monitor heartbeats, sweat, pulse rate, oxygen levels etc. using a wearable device and instantly contact emergency support in case of an emergency. The device can automatically send alerts to your prescribed contacts in case of unusual health metrics. Not only does it prevent a health event but it also saves high medical expenses.
Healthcare / Wellness Apps
Using digital technologies, healthcare professionals can design healthcare or wellness apps that enable patients to track and manage their health from the comfort of their homes. For instance, you can use a wellness app to receive recommendations on food and nutrition. Similarly, you can get mental health counselling from trained and experienced professionals on-demand. There are beauty care apps that can help you to manage your skin for acne, allergy or other issues. Similarly, some apps track your sugar levels, eye health etc.
As healthcare is aggressively moving towards digital transformation, designing the right digital strategy with the right technology stack is the key to fully leveraging this revolution.
Contact CloudTern right now to embark on the digital transformation journey!
Top 10 Myths about Software Product Development
As businesses are embarking on the digitalization journey, software solutions have become a central point of all business operations.
According to Grand View Research, the business software and services market earned a revenue of $389.86 billion in 2020. This value is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.3% between 2021 and 2028.
Right from the time when FORTRAN was released in the 50s, the software industry has been a favourite vertical for many.
At the same time, several myths and misconceptions are floating around this space.
Here are the top 10 myths about software product development.
1) The Most Popular Language is the Best One
Each developer has a favourite programming language and obviously, it will be the one that he is working on. The general notion is that the most popular programming language is the best in the business. However, it is not true. Different languages serve different purposes. You can’t rank one over the other. While choosing a programming language, consider certain aspects such as business requirements, existing technology stack, developers’ expertise, license and usage costs etc.
2) Coding Knowledge is enough to Build a Product
Most novice and inexperienced developers believe that coding knowledge is enough to build a product. While it is true that you need to learn the code to build a product, software development is not just about knowing how to write the code. You need to have domain knowledge, understand the subject area, think from a customer/user perspective etc. You should be able to think beyond the IT space.
3) Software Development is Expensive
Considering the fact that software engineers are highly paid in the industry, small and medium businesses tend to purchase generic software instead of choosing custom application development. However, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution doesn’t suit today’s dynamically changing IT era. When business and user requirements change, realigning IT solutions to meet these needs becomes a challenge. Moreover, when the company grows, you’ll have to rewrite the software.
4) Latest Tools are not always the Best
Often, people believe that using the latest cutting edge tools will make their technology stack robust, powerful and efficient. However, it is not always true. The criteria in choosing a software tool should be the performance, functionality, features, being future-proof, adaptability etc. and not on its popularity. If the tool is not backward-compatible, you’ll have to rewrite your app every time there is an update to the code. So, popularity is not a silver bullet.
5) More People in the Team means Faster Time to Market
In today’s fast-paced world, businesses are required to deliver products faster. As such, people tend to hire more developers to quickly get the work done. Especially, organizations hire more software engineers when the project fails to meet the deadlines. However, adding software engineers to the team doesn’t always expedite the process. It can sometimes become a bottleneck, owing to communication and collaboration issues. A better way is to streamline and orchestrate operations, design the right CI/CD pipelines, apply automation etc.
6) The Project is Done once it goes Live
A software product development project involving various phases such as planning, design and development, testing and deployment. A common notion is that the project is done once the app is uploaded to the app store. However, it is not true. Once the app is available for users, you should monitor the performance, collect feedback and apply changes and updates as and when required. When you don’t update the app for a long time, it might get removed from the app store. In today’s customer-centric product environment, a software engineer job will end only when the app ceases to exist for users.
7) Remote Software Development is Expensive
One common myth in software development circles is that outsourcing software development projects to remote teams incur huge expenses. When you outsource a project to a 3rd party, you will get access to highly experienced professionals. At the same time, you don’t have to deal with the complex hiring process, HR issues, insurance, labour benefits etc. It means you will get the best talent and only be paying for the technical expertise while receiving a quality product in return. The key here is to choose the right outsourcing company for your IT needs.
8) Agile development methods are Complex to Handle
While the IT world is rapidly innovating, agile and DevOps methodologies are becoming an inevitable option. However, some organizations are apprehensive to embrace these methods as they feel it will be difficult to manage cross-functional teams. Implementing a cultural change across the organization is another challenge. So, they continue with the waterfall development process. While the waterfall method seems easy at the beginning, you will end up struggling with flexibility, adaptability, mobility and UI/UX issues once the app is launched.
9) Quality Tools build Quality Products
Often, people believe that choosing a high-quality tool will help them to build a quality product. However, the quality of the product doesn’t depend only on a tool but requires critical thinking, analysis, project planning, communication and collaboration and coding skills etc. Choosing the right tool makes your job easier.
10) Outsourcing is a one-stop solution for all IT problems
Outsourcing is a popular method for organizations to get things done. However, a popular myth is that outsourcing is a one-stop solution for any IT problem and it solves all issues which is not true. Outsourcing is basically done so that the organization can focus on their core processes while the outsourced company handles their IT needs. However, outsourcing comes with its challenges. It is important to choose the right engagement model. When you choose a fixed price model, you might experience service level issues and quality issues. Choosing a dedicated team model is good but it again depends on the company that you select for that project.
Conclusion
Software development is a popular industry that is always evolving. Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s legacy. So, organizations should proactively monitor IT trends and customer requirements and adapt them quickly. Businesses that take application development seriously are sure to surge ahead of the competition.
