Enterprise DevOps Service

In the last stage of a traditional development process, the testing team checks the quality of code manually. This leads to an inadequate & inconsistent testing pattern which results in plenty of bugs as well as integration and deployment issues. This causes a steep increase in the maintenance costs and delays in time-to-market. Hence, Continuous integration is the best solution as it helps development teams to integrate their code-work frequently to detect integration errors early.

CI also reduces manual testing efforts due to the integration of automated tests as a part of the build process. Nebula AI Enterprise DevOps Service leverage industry-leading CI tools that allows to build and test projects continuously. This makes it easier for development & testing team to integrate changes in order to accelerate the quality check process.

Nebula AI’s enterprise continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) Solution can be integrated with existing systems that provides simple version control, robust build & release management & easy-to-use application life cycle management. It helps in increasing release velocity by 60%, cuts time-to-market by 50%, reduces deployment failures and faster development cycle. Enterprise CI/CD solution includes the following:

Enterprise CI/CD solution includes the following:

Infrastructure Management

Design and setup your private Data Center with knowledge transfer.

Environment Security

Cloud Management: Our Edge Computing/Private Cloud Solution to ensure your data secure and unreachable from outside of your network.

Management: Windows/Linux regular updates to the Operating System.

License/Warranty Management: 3rd Party vendor equipment warranty and repairs.

Technology Solution

Nebula AI Enterprise DevOps Service team engaged with the client to assess their project requirements and devised a strategy to solve their problem.

Nebula AI Enterprise DevOps Service process included version control, Continuous Integration, Infrastructure automation and Configuration management services. Tools such as Packer, VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and Ansible were leveraged to ensure that continuous deployment happens on the Containers scale set.

As a part of setting-up the environment, the continuous integration consulting team at Nebula AI linked the application to Gitlab and VSTS Source Control and connected Azure to a VSTS account. They leveraged Packer to create the VHD image, baked with the application code. Scripts were written to use the VHD created by Packer to deploy on Azure.

A VSTS build is triggered each time a code is merged into the master branch of the GitLab repository. The VSTS build just publishes the files needed for the release. Successful builds then trigger a release. The first step of the release packages the latest application files into an Azure VHD image using packer, this Container image is stored in the configured storage account. Ansible was used to configure the image. The team used the Azure CLI group deployment command to push the new Container image (with latest application code baked in) to the Container Scale set. At the end of each successful release, the Container Scale set had the latest application code.

By adopting Continuous Integration, Infrastructure automation and Configuration Management, the client could successfully deploy its latest app to the Container Scale Set.

Advantages

For successful cloud application development and deployment, CI environment has become a necessity now-a-day. CI is a development culture where developers and coders check in code several times into a shared repository every day. Each integration triggers an automated build allowing development teams to detect problems early. As Microsoft Azure Cloud allows to create development, testing and production environment on demand, it is easy for the DevOps consultants as well as the enterprises to adopt CI in their development workflow patterns.

Continuous Integration can be extended to Continuous Testing (CT) or Continuous deployment (CD). An application build that passes the continuous integration test can be easily tested or deployed.

The flowing reasons to adopt CI/CD Process:

✓ Minimizes integration time

In a traditional setup, a team member collects the builds, and integrates all of them every day. Conversely with the CI process, the build is generated automatically thereby reducing the amount spent in integration.

✓ Enables automated testing

Apart from continuous building and integration, the process also allows to perform automated unit and integration testing. These test scripts result in complete test automation solution thereby reducing the project testing time.

✓ Increases progress visibility

Automated integration and testing process generates metrics helping the developers to check the progress of their development. Developers can thus focus on delivering quality code. This in turn develops momentum in the development teams.

✓ Quick creating & deploying builds

CI allows to have at-least one working copy of the build where the actual application is in production phase. This makes the deployment quick as well as easy.

✓ Reduces project risks

This allows tracking of each change set and bug detection early, thus reducing the risks of project failing at the deployment stage.

✓ Better communication between teams

Increased visibility of coding and integration of build establishes better communication between the project teams and its members.

✓ Alert system

Team members receive emails or messages notifying them about the build updates. This helps the teams to respond immediately with necessary actions wherever required.

✓ Various CI tools

Various CI tools such as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Teamcity and Cruisecontrol, Octopus, Bamboo allow the development teams to adopt the CI/CD processes in building real-world Azure Apps. Many development teams are following this process to build cloud applications and helping enterprises in reaching their goals.