How can you effectively choose continuous delivery tools and platforms?

If we are unprepared, we will easily fall for the glittery marketing spiels from the sales vendor.Start with understanding the requirements first , try to map the requirements for the forecasted business volume(atleast 3 years) , persona of the users , existing ecosystems of tools and processes. Without this basics , rushing towards any tools / new features/ deployment process will counter-fire leading to loss of effort / dollars and most importantly dip in the customer satisfaction

One factor is also to understand in which way the developers want and need to interact with the CD framework. There are different ways to interact with the CD tool, such as: 1. UI 2. well-structured and mature CLI 3. plain REST API 4. SDK in particular programming language, i.e. Python

Identifying Goals: 1. Assess the business needs, such as the desired frequency of software product or website updates. 2. Evaluate the current Continuous Delivery (CD) process to identify areas where it lags behind the rapid pace of product/website development. 3. Define the current criteria for software delivery, considering factors like speed to market, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to conduct canary testing of features. 4. Evaluate the readiness of the CD process for global deployment, ensuring scalability and efficiency in delivering code updates across diverse geographical locations. By addressing these key points, you can streamline and enhance your CD process to align better with the dynamic requirements of your business.

After establishing a clear understanding of goals, requirements, and challenges, assessing key features and functionalities for continuous delivery tools is essential. Aligning these with business objectives and customer expectations forms the basis for selection criteria. Identifying current pain points and implementing metrics for quality and performance evaluation further refines priorities. Engaging stakeholders across departments gathers diverse insights, ensuring alignment with the organizational strategy. Conducting comprehensive research and seeking expert recommendations, provides valuable insights. Lastly, devising an implementation roadmap ensures seamless integration into existing systems for successful adoption.

Consider the Community and Support: When choosing a tool or platform, it’s also important to consider the community and support around it. A strong, active community can be a valuable resource for getting help, and learning best practices. You can look at the frequency of updates, the responsiveness of the support team, and the availability of resources like documentation, tutorials, and forums. For instance tools like Jenkins, and Kubernetes have large, active communities and extensive resources available. This means that if you run into issues or need to learn how to do something, there's a good chance you can find help quickly.

- Utilize Online Resources: Leverage online reviews, ratings, and testimonials. Look for case studies and product demos to understand real-world applications and benefits. - Seek Expert Opinions: Get insights from peers, mentors, and industry experts. They can provide valuable feedback based on their experiences and knowledge. - Consider Costs and ROI: Analyze the pricing models of the tools for affordability and transparency. It’s important that they offer good value for money and a potential return on investment. - User Feedback: Pay attention to what current users are saying about the tools. User feedback can provide insights into real-world performance and potential issues that may not be apparent in product descriptions.

I'd say have a Clarity call with different providers to understand what they can offer you better when you are comparing your options ( Especially for startups, It's good to know different buckets). You want to know how to secure those clarity calls, you can reach out to me via email.

We need to do an investigation for all kinds of tools and services. We have to think for the better for our goal. Which service and tool can make it easier, long lasting and productivity. Yes, productivity is more important in the tools because if your goal is completely with a 3rd party tool then we need to take the productivity of our goal and product.

In the CNF cloud world, you can ask your customer Cloud admin what tools they recommend. Depending on their expertise they will have a familiarity with some as migrating namespaces should be a common task. I find it helpful to come out with my requirements for a namespace migration. I can then speak to the Sales Architects for the Tools and request a presentation from them. Based on their material, I decide if we use their tools or not.

When testing a tool for continuous delivery make sure to take a diverse set of developers from your company as testimonials, i.e. application developers, platform engineers, data scientists, SRE's. Each of them will provide a different notion of what they need in a CD tool to truly support their daily tasks.

Testing can take different forms - you can do it yourself by using a trial or community version of the solutions or you can send to a vendor a list of your requirements and ask them to demo them for you.

When we opt a option, we need to measure the work performance and tools and services that we are using. Regular maintenance is needed in tools and also be aware about the new technology that comes into the environment. Sometimes goal expectations and needs will change according to the situation of demand. So we need to think about new requirements.

Having a set of specific requirements is key. I go to the level of versions used in the source namespace (OpenShift, Kubernetes, etc) and do the same for the targeted namespace. I also specify exactly the resources used. Companies have taken these requirements and have used their labs to give the demos. Of course, their labs sometimes will not have exactly what I'm looking for. My next step would be to allow these vendors to use our development labs and conduct a demo.

- Set Up Testing Environments: Use sandbox, staging, or production environments to run experiments and simulations. - Measure Performance Metrics: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to objectively measure the performance of each tool. This could include deployment frequency, failure rate, recovery time, and others relevant to your process. - Assess Usability: Evaluate how user-friendly and intuitive the tools are. This includes the ease of setting up, configuring, and using the tool on a day-to-day basis. - Check Reliability: Test the tools for stability and reliability. Monitor for any crashes, bugs, or performance issues during the testing phase.

Release of software without any imperative of compromising quality or security is an important consideration. Enter "Test automation". Fundamental, basic, way to go are some terms we hear when we hear Test automation and yet this seems to be a challenge for many firms. Your output is only as good as your input - tested code. Model potential threats. Cred-scan. Keep secrets safe. Tighten access controls. Remove unwanted utilities post code commit. Prepare rollback.

As part of evaluation and adoption of Continuous Delivery tools, a good strategy might be to also look at homegrown tools used within the larger org vs. only commercial tools. Based on the specific product/cloud architecture, security or data residency needs for an application, a customized CD tool may work better than an "off the shelf" tool. This is where "inner sourcing" can come into play. If there is already a home grown or customized tool that is proven to handle the organization and aplication needs, it may be best to just leverage that vs choosing a new tool and then customizing.

How much can be generated with generative ai technology and tools. In the future DevOps pipeline will be generated once you check in the project code into repo if it does exist with a simple prompt. Good consideration on generative ai will help you to adopt the right tools that increases productivity and improve time to market

When focusing on continuous delivery tools, it's important to recognize the vital role of continuous integration. It aligns with CD and facilitates the creation of a robust CI/CD pipeline. Evaluate your business requirements and determine if you have suitable tools in place to support CD. This assessment will also guide the implementation of CI. Take a holistic approach to the overall CI/CD pipeline, conduct thorough research to identify top tools, and leverage existing resources that align with your needs.

Compatibility with existing tools and processes: Choose tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing version control systems (VCS), build tools, testing frameworks, and deployment environments. Avoid unnecessary complexity and data silos by prioritizing native integrations and minimizing the need for custom scripting.