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DevOps

  • DevOps
  • [x] Goals
  • [x] CI
  • [x] Continuous Delivery
  • [x] Continuous Deployment
  • [ ] Costs
  • [ ] Tools
  • [x] Config Management
  • [x] Monitoring
  • [x] A/B Testing
  • [ ] Release Management
  • [x] Feature flags
  • [x] Prod tests

DevOps includes all of the work after the code is written. Once it needs to enter the CI pipeline or the CD pipeline - or both! DevOps helps to make things easier between developers and infrastructure. Has a focus on automation, scaling, monitoring, and pipelining.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Basically automated building and testing of the code. Let's you know if after any commit there is an issue in the code, but it relies on having good static or dynamic tests in place. Helps you to get more feedback on failures or errors in the system and give some confidence around robustness of the code.

Continuous Delivery & Continuous Deployment

CDel gets the code ready to be deployed, but does not deploy it. CDep does deploy the code.

It takes a lot of tooling and work to get CD to work, and cost to support the infrastructure to home the deployments, but you get constant feedback on knowing that the code will work. The feedback leads to general faster agility on releases where you don't have to wait for a release cycle to complete before learning about any issues.

Infrastructure Configuration Management

Infrastructure as code is an approach to script the creation of infrastructure projects. In CMPUT 402, this was most closely reflected by the use of Docker and Github Actions.

Monitoring

Monitoring is very important to help support quality objectives for robustness, reliability, performance and security. Clues can exist in the system logs that enable developers to see what has happened when it is not easy or possible to debug a running process, or when things happen in production or outside working hours.

A/B Testing

This is typically an approach used to expose different versions of the system to different audiences. It's probably more closely related to chaos engineering than testing, because it's usually an experiment to collect some kind of measure to then decide which version to use.

Feature Flags

Feature flags can also be an easy way to enable A/B testing because you can program in the ability to easily enable or disable features on the fly.

Release Management

Major/Minor/Patch

Major releases introduce breaking changes to the API. Minor releases add features that must be backwards compatible without breaking the API. Patches are compatible bug fixes.

Testing in Prod

Beta tests, AB Tests, tests across devices/regions

It's important to collect real world information on real world systems using real world data. There are blind spots when we are only in test environments and using staged data.

There's a bigger focus on monitoring here since production shouldn't be stopped and interfering with the process through debugging may not be possible, or may put the system at unreasonable risk.