DevOps practice

Configuration management is a DevOps practice that makes continuous delivery and DevOps possible. It entails using scripts to automatically set the deployment environment (networks, virtual machines, etc.) to the needed configuration regardless of its initial state.

The ABCloudz team provides customers with the following recommendations:

• Using multiple environments to ensure that your software is thoroughly tested before deployment. We adhere to a four-stage model both for code and database script changes. This model includes development, test, staging, and production environments.
• Improving performance by changing instance types, moving databases to the managed cloud service instead of virtual machines, or updating the architecture of the existing cloud system.
• Creating automated recovery processes and implementing automatic notification and tracking of failures to improve your system’s reliability.

Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a DevOps practice in which developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.
Finding and fixing bugs faster, improving software quality, and reducing the time it takes to validate and release new software updates are key goals of continuous integration.
Where continuous integration ends, continuous delivery begins.

Continuous delivery
Continuous Delivery is a DevOps practice in which code changes are automatically generated, tested, and prepared for production release. By continuously integrating all code changes into the test environment, developers will always have a ready-to-deploy build that goes through a standardized testing process.

Using СI/CD you get the following advantages:

• Less time needed for creating working stable builds and decreasing time and efforts for all deployment environments.
• Error elimination for the deployment process to production.
• Reducing application testing time.
• Saving time (and money, as a result) throughout the whole project.
• Eliminating the probability that the product on the output (prod) will not correspond to the code in the Source repository.
• Without a normal CI/CD process, a team of more than 2 people starts to fail at the stage of interaction and building a common project (the chaos begins without an established CI/CD process, a lot of manual time is wasted).

Continuous automated testing is a DevOps practice of automatically reviewing and validating a software product to make sure it meets predefined quality standards for code, functionality, and user experience.

Continuous automated testing gives you the following benefits:

• Faster feedback
• Accelerated results
• Reduced business expenses
• Testing efficiency improvement
• Higher overall test coverage
• Reusability of automated tests
• Earlier detection of defects
• Thoroughness in testing
• Faster time to market
• Information security

Monitoring is Devops’ practice of collecting, classifying and analyzing data generated by applications and infrastructure. It helps our customers understand how changes or updates affect users and provides insight into the root causes of problems or unexpected changes.

At ABCloudz, we use for monitoring the following platforms:

• Prometheus, Grafana
• Graylog / ELK
• Managed services (i.e. AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor)

These solutions help you aggregate all logs in one place and then use a single dashboard that displays all occurring issues and analytic reports.

Using cloud services, a customer needs to take care of possible security issues. Best DevOps practices for network and security setup include using subnets for your data and applications in the cloud, as well as virtual private networks like Azure Virtual Network (VNet) and AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

• Virtual networks are logical containers that separate the resources you create from other customers within your cloud.
• Subnets allow for giving different access rules to the resources you place inside.

Using DevOps scripts, you can set up new subnets and virtual networks in a matter of clicks when you need them.