Just-In-Time (JIT) Software delivery

DevOps has been borrowing concepts from the manufacturing industry to identify the bottlenecks in the software release process to make Just-In-Time (JIT) Software delivery. Combining the lean software practices with the JIT makes a powerful DevOps culture within the organisation.

goPaddle v3.0 covers application lifecycle management starting from release planning to production deployments, such that any bottlenecks in the application lifecycle can be identified & rectified through intelligent analytics. Release Pipelines provide the workflow automation for continuous build, integration and deployment across different stages of the lifecycle. Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Atlassian Jira users can now link their release or project plans with goPaddle, onboard an application from an existing source control repository, build a release pipeline and measure the release effectiveness over a period of time. This comes along with the portability benefit as well. goPaddle packages the applications as Docker containers, thus applications built once using goPaddle can be deployed on AWS, Google or Azure Cloud. In case of Azure, goPaddle goes one step further to support portable deployments across Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

Google and Azure developers

goPaddle provides a seamless experience to Google & Azure Developers by allowing Single-Sign-On using existing cloud accounts and provide a single- command line tool helps to provision scalable Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

The concept of “Bring Your Own Infrastructure” and the “Build Once Deploy Anywhere” completely alleviates vendor lock-in at every level.

Technology companies like Offshore Development Centres (ODC), BFSI, FinTech and e-commerce companies can take advantage of this platform for streamlining and automating their end-to-end application lifecycle management. For developers and growing businesses, the platform is available as hosted subscription model. Developer license gives a lifetime free subscription to use the platform and as the team size increases, the teams can leverage the pay-as-you-grow model. For large enterprises, the solution is available as an on-premise edition with perpetual license, training and enterprise SLAs.

Edited from press release by Jordan Platt

The post Create a powerful DevOps culture appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Self-driving cars, connected homes, automated manufacturing controllers and smart cities are beckoning smart management of distributed devices and their ecosystem. Be it a consumer device or an industrial manufacturing robot, every single device needs to be managed, updated and mined.

An IoT ecosystem comprises of devices and firmware, telematic data and analytics, network and security. As more and more devices get added, scale and distributed nature of the IoT ecosystem makes the management and maintenance more complex.

A typical deployment architecture has distributed set of devices that connect to the cloud via IoT gateway. All leading cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google provide IoT gateway SDKs to connect to the cloud resources.

Unless an IoT PaaS platform like Azure IoT Suite is used, custom software components to connect and analyse data needs to be developed, tested and deployed on cloud.

Deployment architecture and distributed configuration management

Overall architecture and the distributed nature of the devices and software components form the fundamentals of framing a DevOps strategy. The configuration model should consider the sequence of deployments and the dependencies between the hardware/software components.

Zero touch provisioning and bootstrapping the devices

When a device is switched on for the first time, the auto-install feature of a firmware or a network boot can automatically install and bootstrap the Chef or Puppet base deployment agents. These deployment agents can then download the required RPMs/packages and configures the devices. The choice of deployment agent should consider the RAM consumption of both the agent and dependent packages to be installed on the device.

Secure deployments

Security is a major consideration for IoT deployments, as any malicious software can intrude the updates on the devices. The IoT gateway can act as a secure gateway to authenticate the connections between the deployment agent and the Chef/Puppet master.

Massive scale and single click upgrades

A combination of Chef roles and runlists, or Puppet MCollective can help in identifying the participating devices and on-demand updates on a select set of devices.

Simulators for dev and test

Device simulators can be used for dev and test. Chef/Puppet environments can be used as a mechanism to define the continuous integration workflows.

Blue-green deployment

Backward compatibility issues between the devices and software components can break an application. Blue-green deployments can help by routing the request/response based on the application/firmware version.

This article was originally published on Linkedin, and edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.

The post Nuts and bolts of DevOps for IoT appeared first on DevOps Online North America.