What is Release Planning in DevOps?
Release planning in DevOps involves planning, scheduling, and
controlling the software development and delivery process.
Unlike earlier development approaches, DevOps includes both
developers and IT operations collaborating from the beginning
of the process to the end. By this method, they allow fewer,
shorter feedback loops and faster releases.
Besides this, DevOps teams share accountability for the
services they deliver, their code, and take on-call
responsibilities. When software developers and IT
professionals are involved in the entire delivery lifecycle
and on-call, incidents are detected and resolved faster. This
process is followed during and after the release
process.
To understand more about release planning, you need to take a
look at the key areas of the release cycle that can help you
make a better decision about release planning.
Release Cycle in DevOps:
-
Continuous Exploration:
By engaging in practices of continuous exploration, teams
can provide each other with honest feedback, and compare
their performance to the industry standard. It is an
extension of the lean startup methodology, which
acknowledges that problems often come from persevering for
too long, and encourages teams to retrospect, learn from
their mistakes, and improve with each project. Business
agility depends on the decider’s understanding that
tells when to persevere or rotate. This also includes the
ability to change direction when required. Strong
performance in this phase allows teams to identify the
viability of diverse ideas and become clear about their
goals.
-
Continuous Integration:
DevOps teams continuously integrate components, systems, and
solutions using a prioritized backlog from continuous
exploration. It is the build phase, owned by the developer.
This stage should be automated, and the process of
committing, containerizing, testing, and deploying code
should ideally take no more than a few minutes. Continuous
integration covers the development, building, testing, and
staging.
-
Continuous Deployment:
Improved performance in continuous deployment involves
reviewing each sub-dimension and comparing the performance
of all teams to the industry standard. Features are deployed
to production in this phase, and teams aspire to
consistently release features that can then be utilized by
the business.
-
Release On Demand:
Through continuous deployments, businesses release features
on-demand. However, all features need not be necessarily or
immediately visible to end-users. How features are
ultimately consumed by end-users depends on decisions made
in the release on-demand phase of the DevOps reliability. In
this phase, businesses ensure features provide optimal
business value by releasing, stabilizing, measuring, and
getting feedback from the complete cycle.
Best Practices for Effective Release Planning in
DevOps
After knowing the release cycle, you need to understand the
practices that will help you map out effective release
planning. Here are some of the best practices that you can
implement:
-
State the Criteria for Success:
Before you release an application, you should know whether
it’s ready to be released or not. One way to find this
our: Clear acceptance requirements. Once you know
what’s expected from the product, you can explore
whether the product should be released or not. The clear
acceptance requirements are essential in both releases and
testing to do more reliable releases. You should throw away
the process of learning from your mistakes and continue to
iterate on the release management process to figure out what
works best. Product owners, quality managers, and release
managers need to define key release metrics and acceptance
criteria before moving ahead to a new project.
-
Aim for Minimal Customer Impact: A release should be reliable and should not impact the
customer. Hence, the focus of the release managers should be
on reducing downtime and customer impact. And there are some
key steps like Proactive testing, active monitoring, and
real-time collaborative alerting where they can do better to
identify issues during a release or even before the
customers do. By working on a collaborative incident
response plan, the team can quickly resolve incidents for a
successful release.
-
Take Advantage of the Staging Environment:
Constantly monitoring the staging environment and keeping it
as close as possible to your production environment can
ensure more successful releases. Everyone, from product
owners to QA, should be combing through staging and running
tests to identify any issues with a new deployment. As long
as your staging environment is nearly identical to
production, you can easily find issues in staging before
deploying the code to production. A well-designed staging
environment reduces customer impact and helps DevOps teams
to meet acceptance criteria faster.
-
Streamline CI/CD and QA:
By moving QA, automation, and testing earlier in the
development lifecycle, the DevOps team can identify
potential issues faster. And this is possible through the
shift-left approach. This approach reduces the amount of
time spent in feedback loops and allows the delivery
pipeline to continue moving forward. The more you integrate
testing with development workflows, the easier it will be
for you to maintain a consistent CI/CD pipeline.
-
Replace Manual Work With Automation:
Always look for the processes that can be automated. It can
improve the efficiency of your people, processes, and
technology. Be it software development, QA, or IT
operations, automation should be used to reduce human error
and make day-to-day operations easier. This allows your
teams to spend more time on strategic thinking and less time
on day-to-day tasks and helps you consistently deliver
reliable services to your customers.
-
Make Things Immutable, If Possible:
In programming, an immutable object’s state
can’t be modified once it has been created. Immutable
programming helps teams deploy entirely new configurations
rather than modifying existing ones. By doing this, you
reduce errors and bugs that could appear from changing
current configurations. This causes releases to be
inherently more reliable and makes customers and employees
happier.
Tools for Release Planning
Throughout your DevOps journey, you will encounter many tools
of every sort. Since release planning is a key phase in
DevOps, you will need tools for this stage as well. So, here
is a list of tools that will ease your release planning:
-
Ansible:
It is a release management tool that simplifies IT
automation. It automates cloud provisioning, configuration
management, application deployment, intra-service
orchestration, etc. The tool turns tedious tasks into
easy-to-use, repeatable playbooks.
-
BuildMaster:
It is an end-to-end CI/CD solution that allows developers
and operations personnel to coordinate and optimize every
step of the application release management process.
-
CA Release Automation:
This release management tool stops unplanned work by
regulating and speeding up app delivery across the entire
software development process from development to
production.
-
Jenkins:
It provides hundreds of plugins to assist in building,
deploying, and automating your projects. It is one of the
most popular tools currently available.
-
Spinnaker:
This open-source cloud delivery platform is created by
Netflix that offers fast, safe, and repeatable
deployments.
-
UrbanCode Release:
It is IBM’s release management tool that allows users
to plan, execute, and track releases through every stage of
the delivery lifecycle.
Conclusion
Be it any software development approach, the focus always
remains on the release. Every organization eyes the reliable
release, hence, planning in advance is a must. From building
an application to deploying it, you need to cover each aspect
of the release planning. This includes complying with the best
practices and using the right set of tools, so the chance of
errors can be reduced and a quality application can be
delivered.
