The DevOps movement is gaining momentum, albeit at different speeds in different organizations. While the goal has been to streamline workflows between development and operations teams, there are a number of technological and cultural challenges companies have to address to optimize DevOps, and more importantly the entire software life cycle.
If you’re confused about how to implement DevOps in your organization, or you’re confused about what DevOps means to begin with, you’re not alone. There’s no one way to implement DevOps that works equally well for all companies (or teams for that matter), but there are a few best practices that can ease the transition. There are also different ways of describing DevOps, including its relationship to agile life-cycle management (ALM), agile, and Continuous Delivery. But regardless of the definition one prefers, the goal is the same: to get better quality software out the door faster and to ensure working software out in the field.
Connect the dots
Doing DevOps right takes a lot of tooling, some of which many companies still don’t yet have. Over the years, they’ve amassed point-specific tools, and some have embraced Continuous Integration, but the automation pipeline does not yet extend to operations.
“A lot of shops have an automated testing tool here or there, or a build tool, but they really don’t have the complete suite of automated tooling that they need,” said Dan Juengst, senior director of product marketing at CloudBees.
(Related: DevOps means a culture change)
The collection of specialized tools tends to exacerbate functional silos and a lack of end-to-end visibility. While there are a lot of great purpose-specific tools, many of them were not designed to work together, which makes effective collaboration and automated hand-offs difficult. Since no one vendor offers everything—and people within organizations are not inclined to jettison their favorite tools—there is a need for an integration layer that facilitates end-to-end workflows among the disparate toolsets.
“There are a lot of tools that do part of DevOps,” said Sam Guckenheimer, group product owner at Microsoft. “You’ve got release pipeline tools, monitoring tools, development tools and backlog-management tools, but rarely do they hook together, so you have a lot of homegrown integration, and everywhere you go you have a different collage of how the pieces fit. The measurement of effectiveness is how effectively you can get from an idea to working software in a user’s hands and how quickly you can [remediate an issue for a user].”
There is a tendency to acquire tools when a specific need arises. But without a coherent tool-acquisition strategy, point problems can get solved at the expense of a coherent, overall strategy.
“There’s a lot of emphasis put on the tool collection process, and we’re seeing a lot of companies fail,” said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop. “The easiest part of DevOps is automation, and they think that’s it. If you don’t have visibility into your application—how it’s working and how users are using it—you’re just getting to a point where things don’t work faster.”
Build cross-functional teams
Doing DevOps right requires a supportive culture, not just a collection of tools, so there has to be adequate attention given to people and processes. Like going agile, embracing DevOps is a journey that takes time, patience and a willingness to embrace new ways of working.
“I think it’s just a matter of who’s doing the right things,” said Prince Huang, director of operations and marketing at TechExcel. “At the corporate level, everybody has their role, and they have to work together. In smaller organizations, developers and IT are sometimes the same people.”
What the DevOps structure looks like varies from organization to organization. Some have established formal DevOps teams and others have not. What’s “best” boils down to whether the new structure helps or hinders the ability to deliver better-quality software faster.
“Some companies establish a separate group, but what happens is that the group is still siloed from the rest of the organization,” said Flint Brenton, CEO of CollabNet. “What you need to do is break those silos down, so you need to look more holistically at the process end-to-end that brings all the stakeholders together. So basically you have a virtual team across the entire organization.”
Tearing down traditional walls can be difficult because there are existing job descriptions and power structures. On the other hand, it’s difficult to embrace a new way of working without aligning the culture, including how people think, how they work together, and their collective commitment to common objectives.
“Companies have to align their different teams to work toward the same metrics like faster cycle time from development to deployment, and all the teams need to align to a common goal,” said Ashish Kuthiala, senior director of marketing and strategy for DevOps at HP. “Their incentives need to be in line with that common goal, [and the tools need to facilitate] one team delivering the same thing.”
(Related: Businesses are using DevOps to change APM)
Microsoft literally tore down its walls to break down organizational barriers that had been created over the years. Personal offices and conference rooms have been replaced by project team rooms and “focus” rooms where a few people can do something like talk on the phone without disrupting other team members.
“We have an organization of feature crews—basically eight to 12 engineers who sit together in one room working on a similar area of the product, and in the next room is a team working on an adjacent feature in the product so you have a natural flow of discussion and camaraderie among the people who work on the same stuff,” said Microsoft’s Guckenheimer.
Everyone on those teams has a common set of metrics and a common dashboard with clickable views that are appropriate to different roles such as development and operations. And, instead of having different career paths for developers, testers and operations, there is now a single career path to take.
Supercharge agile
Agile and DevOps go hand-in-hand, though speeding up development and testing can only take an organization so far. To alleviate the problem, more companies are embracing DevOps so they can supplement continuous builds and testing with Continuous Delivery to enable end-to-end automated workflows.
Of course, not all organizations have adopted Continuous Delivery, and for good reasons. However, organizations that have already embraced Continuous Integration are tending to move toward Continuous Delivery to extend automation and collaboration to production and beyond. And similarly, organizations that have already embraced agile in some fashion are moving toward DevOps because it, too, is the next logical step.
“If you totally commit to agile and you see success, it’s hard to see things another way,” said Rod Cope, CTO of Rogue Wave. “With that mentality, you look at anything that can get in the way of high-quality, well-tested, ready-to-use code such as waiting for machines to be procured or waiting for manual tests or signoffs.”
Advantages agile organizations have over their less agile counterparts include a cross-functional way of working and broader adoption of automated solutions, both of which are required for DevOps and Continuous Delivery. Like agile, organizations can make the same mistakes they made with DevOps, such as embarking on one massive attempt to transform the organization when it is wiser to start with a small project that has all the right human and technological resources in place, as well as the requisite organizational support.
“The question is, is DevOps something you do or is [it] the culture you build?” said CloudBees’ Juengst. “In our view, it’s a culture you build.”
For years, teams embracing agile have been internally focused: getting rid of technical debt, structuring themselves more effectively, improving their scheduling and evolving their definition of “done” with the goal of producing potentially shippable code. DevOps goes a step further.
“At the time, they were not concerned with a potentially shippable increment getting shipped or deployed. The shift from agile to DevOps says it doesn’t count unless it’s used,” said Microsoft’s Guckenheimer. “You build it, you ship it, and you measure the usage. You need to make sure that your value is perceived as value in the customers’ eyes and that your improvements are always improvements for the customer.”
At HP, there are teams in which developers are responsible for the code they introduce in production for three to six months. That way, they’re constantly working with the testers and the production team to ensure that everything works and keeps working.
“Nobody knows how to do this perfectly,” said HP’s Kuthiala. “As you experiment, you have to be able to fail and learn from that. In the DevOps language, ‘Iterate, iterate and improve, and do the next thing and see if that works.’ Where there’s tolerance for such behavior, DevOps adoption is usually much faster.”
Don’t be ashamed
A lot of companies look at others Facebook and Netflix and think the ultimate goal is Continuous Deployment when the reality is that not all business models need to achieve the same things in the same ways.
“Large organizations are not as flexible as startups. [The question is] how do we organize ourselves to deliver software more efficiently but still have all the enterprise controls and compliance functions in place to make sure something doesn’t get broken or lost along the way,” said Rogue Wave’s Cope. “Anything you can do to automate testing of all kinds—unit functional, security, configuration—all those things are critical because they’re what underpin your ability to trust the software.”
Despite hiring consultants and acquiring tools, teams may get a sinking feeling that they’re failing a few months into their agile or DevOps transformations. And some of them will be.
“I think everyone’s forgotten that you need an agile process throughout the value stream; that process, the integration required for tools and the visibility you need across the different areas has been forgotten,” said Tasktop’s Kersten. “If your agile process is not connected to your traditional product, you haven’t improved anything. That’s why we see these claims that people aren’t getting ROI from their DevOps transformation or the transformation isn’t working. All that’s happening is it’s easier for code to be pushed into production.”
What’s right for an organization or team needs to be collectively decided by the stakeholders. That includes the people involved, what their roles are, and how they work together, as well as the tools, processes and training that will be necessary to succeed with DevOps. And all of it is a moving target. That’s why regardless of where a company is, an iterative approach is recommended: Start small, learn from mistakes, refine and build on successes.
“We’ve seen successful companies adopt a DevOps culture by first introducing transparent communication between the groups so that the teams could recognize the value of each others’ roles and domains,” said CollabNet’s Brenton. “Incremental DevOps practices were introduced so they did not disrupt the overall flow of product or quality, and all groups understood the cost and benefits.”
Easing up DevOps
We asked the SD Times Buyers Guide sponsors what they are doing to ease the transition to DevOps and to make DevOps as efficient as possible. This is what they had to say:
Sam Guckenheimer, group product owner, Microsoft
We start by thinking about team autonomy and enterprise alignment. We’ve renovated our buildings so that feature crews (Scrum teams) work in team rooms. We’ve [made lighter] all the planning and review ceremonies to mail and video, and we provide lots of mentorship to cross-pollinate expertise. We have weekly live site reviews, where we practice the “Five Whys,” and monthly service reviews were we benchmark our progress and opportunities for improvement. We use regular meetups to learn more. Everyone writes a personal learning plan.
On the technology side, we are a user of Azure, just as our external customers are. Additionally, we adopt early and contribute tooling to other teams. We share best practices and tools, and continually look for learning opportunities. We measure everything and automate wherever possible, both in the engineering process and in running the live site. On any given day. We’ll gather 60 to 159GB of telemetry data.
We budget 15% to 20% of our resources on engineering improvements. For example, we recently attacked the inefficiency of how we triaged live site alerts. We introduced a health model, based on the code and org structures, so that the system would automatically pinpoint the root-cause alert and autodial the directly responsible engineer on-call in the right feature crew. We saw a 40x improvement in alerting efficiency in the first month. This eliminated the need for tier 1 triage and improved time to escalate, which we hold to five minutes during work hours.
Rod Cope, CTO, Rogue Wave
One mistake organizations make when easing into DevOps is introducing a DevOps department within their company. Though it sounds good in theory, the idea of a DevOps department isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, DevOps departments are often more trouble than they’re worth.
When starting a new process or idea, organizations often jump straight to the new idea and don’t take into consideration how it will impact all the other connected parts. Oftentimes, organizations add a new department without removing something (or someone) else, so it ends up adding more process and more red tape than anticipated. The idea behind a DevOps department is to make sure that things run smoother and more continuous.
In my experience, I find that organizations have more success if they solely focus on the new processes of DevOps and not on introducing a new department. Once an organization has a solid structure around processes, they can begin to focus on the right tools. An organization needs to work through the entire development process with security and quality tools that check code from the very beginning.
Tools such as static code analysis and open-source scanning need to be used early and often. DevOps is only successful if QA is everyone’s job; this is especially true for developers. QA should be occurring while a developer codes in order for DevOps to work successfully. If QA is only right before production, then DevOps comes to a screeching halt.
Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop
The very thing the industry has done to make the individual disciplines within software development and delivery as efficient as possible has actually made DevOps less efficient. The industry has created a rich ecosystem of tools (agile planning, test/defect management, requirement elicitation and management, project and portfolio management, help desk, and issue tracking) designed to make the discipline they support (developers, testers, business analysts, project managers, systems administrators) as efficient as possible. But these tools do such a strong job of supporting the individual disciplines that they create an impediment for cross-discipline collaboration, because the artifacts they create and manage are locked in each of the individual tools.
Tasktop makes DevOps efficient by flowing information from tool to tool and enabling collaboration among the practitioners in the entire software development and delivery life cycle. Business epics created by the PMO in a PPM tool flow to the business analysts using a requirements-management tool. Those requirements flow to the agile planning tools where the team can create user stories. The requirements also flow to the test-management tools, where the testers can create and execute their test strategies.
All the artifacts (requirements, defects, trouble tickets, tests, etc.) that are created to support software delivery are automatically shared across the team, increasing the flow of communication and enabling the cross-discipline collaboration that defines the term “DevOps.”
Dan Juengst, senior director of product marketing, CloudBees
CloudBees, the enterprise Jenkins company, is helping enterprise IT organizations make the transition to DevOps by providing a key enabling automation platform that can be used to implement true Continuous Delivery, i.e. the automation of the application delivery life cycle, which is one of the fundamental foundations of DevOps.
The CloudBees Jenkins Platform is powered by the time-tested, open-source Jenkins automation engine. Jenkins has been used for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery for over 10 years and has over 100,000 active installations. CloudBees provides an enterprise version of Jenkins that includes advanced enterprise features and professional technical support. By automating the application delivery life cycle with the CloudBees Jenkins Platform, enterprise IT organizations are taking the first critical step toward DevOps.
The CloudBees Jenkins Platform allows organizations to automate the various tasks that must occur between code being created by development to applications being deployed to production by operations. Whether it is merging in new code, scanning the code for security and errors, compiling and building the application, running unit or functional tests, deploying to staging or user acceptance tests, or deploying directly to production, the CloudBees Jenkins Platform can automate all of these steps and provide the direct feedback to the stakeholders in both Dev and Ops so that they can collaborate and accelerate application delivery. Perfectly suited for coupling with an agile development model, Continuous Delivery, powered by CloudBees, becomes the key foundation for a DevOps transformation.
Ashish Kuthiala, senior director of marketing and strategy for DevOps, HP
DevOps is a relatively new and difficult journey for large enterprises that have legacy organizational structures, tool chains, and processes that are hard to change overnight. Transitioning to a DevOps-centric culture at a large scale must involve an integrated transformation across three core elements: people, processes, and tool chains. Otherwise, the transition is likely to fail.
HP’s IT organization is one of the largest IT organizations on the planet. We have been undergoing our own DevOps transformation to better deliver IT value to HP’s business and our customers. Our success has depended on careful evaluation and change management across our people, processes and tool chains. Executive management’s support, acceptance and encouragement of unavoidable failures—and our ability to learn and adapt quickly and iteratively from these failures—has been a key ingredient in accelerating the adoption of DevOps within HP. Managing the risk of failure is a key element of the cultural and organizational change that large enterprises need to master to enable faster adoption of DevOps at an enterprise scale.
Our internal DevOps transformation has allowed HP Enterprise to build a core set of offerings around a set of professional services and products that help our enterprise customers more effectively plan and manage their DevOps transformations around people, processes, and tool chains. Our experience, methods and tools have proved critical and extremely useful for customers implementing DevOps in large-scale enterprises.
Flint Brenton, CEO, CollabNet
We did a series of steps to ease the transition to DevOps and make it as efficient as possible. First, we created a senior role within the company who could engage with other senior members across the business to help evangelize and sell the organizational benefits of DevOps. We then created a cross-functional team comprised of engineering development, product management and marketing, and operations. This team starts by understating our current state flow of artifacts (software, configuration, data, infrastructure, etc.) and information (requirements, work assignments, notifications, documentation, etc.) across our development to operations delivery pipeline.
One of the best ways we have seen and [been] able to prove the value of DevOps was starting with a highly visible product release that continued to be challenging for our developers and operations. The team looked to see how they could streamline the delivery pipeline by performing a value stream mapping to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks and risks. Next, they started to understand how to make the value stream leaner and how automation could be introduced into the process. Once they successfully showed how one could improve the value stream of a highly visible but previously problematic product release, the team was able to demonstrate the value that DevOps could deliver and the value of having a cross-functional team. This allowed the team to repeat these best practices across multiple value streams and continue to spread the DevOps philosophy efficiently across the organization.
Prince Huang, director of operations and marketing, TechExcel
DevOps has been gaining attention and traction because of the need for rapid delivery resulting from agile development movements. Companies are constantly striving for faster time to market, shortened lead time between fixes, and lower release failure rates. As a result, the DevOps approach has been formed to support this objective, especially in the form of automation.
DevSuite, TechExcel’s ALM product, has traditionally been able to help organizations manage and standardize development and releases via agile development methods and complete traceability. We understand the importance of rapid deployment and are focused to help companies make the transition to DevOps. We have partnered with many automation tools for testing and Continuous Integration such as Ranorex and Jenkins so customers don’t have to look far to start utilizing these tools. Right out of the box, DevSuite will include them.
It’s important to understand that transitioning to DevOps is as much about people as it is about process and tools. While DevSuite offers a platform for process and automation, it is also a place for collaboration between operational and development teams. The system facilitates conversations with individual team members, and has a knowledgebase that serves as a common place for teams to share ideas.
Unfortunately, introducing DevOps practices isn’t going to be easy. Big changes often generate resistance, with leaders afraid of the costs that come with the change. TechExcel is looking to eliminate added costs from the need to buy other third-party modules by offering a complete solution to support DevOps.
A guide to DevOps tool offerings
Atlassian: Bamboo offers first-class support for the “delivery” aspect of Continuous Delivery, tying automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. It gives developers, testers, build engineers, and systems administrators a common space to work and share information while keeping sensitive operations like production deploys locked down. Bamboo puts branches under test automatically (as well as merges), and deploys them according to your team’s processes. It also boasts the best JIRA and Stash integration.
Automic: Automic is a global leader in business automation, helping enterprises drive competitive advantage by automating their IT and business systems—in the cloud, with Big Data, empowering the DevOps revolution and across the Internet of Things. The company’s flagship product is the Automic ONE Automation Platform. With offices worldwide, Automic powers more than 2,600 customers, including Bosch, Netflix, eBay, AMC Theatres, ExxonMobil, BT Global Services, Societe Generale, NHS SBS, and General Electric. Automic is privately held by EQT.
CA Technologies: CA Service Virtualization is a solution to help address DevOps challenges. It helps eliminate constraints by modeling and simulating the behavior and performance characteristics of dependent systems and services. Organizations can move development and test tasks earlier in the life cycle; reduce time-to-market; lower infrastructure costs; and improve overall application quality. Customers have experienced as much as a 25% to 50% reduction in cycle times, as well as reduced lab infrastructure within three months of adoption.
Chef: Chef Enterprise delivers a shared repository of code for automating applications and resources. The solution provides a way for development and operations teams to collaborate and move at the speed of the market. It includes role-based access control, centralized reporting, activity monitoring, an enhanced management console, and multi-tenancy.
CloudBees: CloudBees provides Continuous Delivery solutions powered by Jenkins that allow DevOps teams to manage and control software delivery processes. Along with commercial support for Jenkins, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise provides a suite of enterprise-level plug-ins that address more-complex requirements found in enterprise environments. With CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, teams are able to deliver software faster while reducing risk. CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center provides centralized management of Jenkins instances throughout the enterprise. It provides the ability to share Jenkins resources between teams and view real-time analytics. DEV@cloud is a cloud service solution that offers the benefits of cloud computing while leveraging the power of Jenkins.
CollabNet: TeamForge ALM is the industry’s No. 1 open application life-cycle management platform that helps automate and manage enterprise application life cycle in a governed, secure and efficient fashion. Leading global enterprises and government agencies rely on TeamForge to extract strategic and financial value from accelerated application development, delivery and DevOps.
Dynatrace: Dynatrace offers a number of products to help DevOps teams build reliable apps faster through collaboration. Dynatrace Application Monitoring detects problems in production, traces transactions, pinpoints end-user issues, provides code-level visibility, eliminates false alarms, and is designed for Continuous Delivery processes. Dynatrace User Experience Management provides crash reports and performance and usage analytics in order for teams to gain insights to help reduce software errors and enhance performance.
Electric Cloud: Electric Cloud is a leader in enterprise Continuous Delivery and DevOps automation, helping organizations deliver better software faster by automating and accelerating build, test and deployment processes at scale. Industry leaders like Qualcomm, SpaceX, Cisco, GE, Gap and E-Trade use Electric Cloud’s solutions to boost software productivity. The ElectricFlow DevOps Automation Platform provides end-to-end control and visibility across shared resources and tool chains, allowing teams to release software faster and more predictably.
HP: A broad portfolio of DevOps services and solutions focus on the people, processes and tool-chain aspects for adopting and implementing DevOps at large-scale enterprises, while ensuring interoperability with industry-leading open-source software and partner products. The solutions enable enterprises to implement Continuous Integration and testing functionality, and to support Test-Driven Development, cloud-based testing, and network and service virtualization. Continuous Delivery and Deployment are essential elements of HP’s DevOps, enabling Continuous Assessment of applications throughout the software delivery cycle to deliver rapid and frequent application feedback to teams. Moreover, the DevOps solution helps IT operations support rapid application delivery (without any downtime) by supporting a Continuous Operations model.
IBM: Bluemix, IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service, combines the strength of IBM’s middleware with other open services and tools from IBM partners and its developer ecosystem to offer DevOps in the cloud: an open, agile development model, scalable from one-person startups to large enterprises. The growing catalog includes more than 100 development tools in categories such as Big Data, Watson analytics, social, mobile, security, and the Internet of Things, and for industries ranging from mobile commerce, academia, advertising, and emerging spaces such as wearables.
JetBrains: TeamCity is a Continuous Integration/build solution designed to help teams perform, save time, and integrate and deploy continuously. It features a number of tools for Continuous Integration, configuration, build history, code quality tracking, VCS interoperability, extensibility and customization, system maintenance, and user management. In addition, TeamCity integrates with all major version-control systems, issue trackers, IDEs, development frameworks, and cloud services
LeanKit: LeanKit provides a shared tool that’s designed to allow development and operations to work collaboratively on a shared process. With LeanKit, teams can map their processes on virtual whiteboards to gain a complete and transparent look into statuses, issues and updates. The highly visual nature of LeanKit helps maximize effectiveness and keeps extended teams on the same page.
Microsoft: Visual Studio Online (VSO), Microsoft’s cloud-hosted DevOps service, offers Git repositories; agile planning; build automation for Windows, Linux and Mac; cloud load testing; Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment to Windows, Linux and Microsoft Azure; application analytics; and integration with third-party DevOps tools. VSO supports any development language and is based on Team Foundation Server. It also integrates with Visual Studio and other popular code editors. VSO is free to the first five users on a team, or to users with MSDN.
New Relic: New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of billions of data points and millions of applications in real time. Its comprehensive SaaS-based solution provides one powerful interface for Web and native mobile applications, and it consolidates the performance-monitoring data for any chosen technology in your environment. It offers code-level visibility for applications in production that cross six languages (Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, PHP and Node.js), and more than 60 frameworks are supported.
OpenMake: OpenMake Release Engineer is a strategic ARA DevOps solution serving both the independent needs of a project team and the architectural operational requirements of the enterprise. Using “next-generation” agentless technology, it eliminates costly maintenance and deploys to multi-platform servers, clouds or containers. It simplifies component packaging, database updates, jumping versions and calendaring, and it offloads your overworked CI process. Our experience in implementing DevOps for hundreds of customers means we have expertise in your environment. Our “pay as you grow” pricing model reduces the risk of entering this corporate process change. Start with a fully functional “Team” version for free.
Puppet Labs: Puppet Enterprise is IT automation software that gives the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud. It automates tasks at all stages of the IT infrastructure life cycle, including discovery, provisioning, OS and app configuration management, orchestration, and reporting. It includes event inspection, supported modules, role-based access control, certification management, and cloud provisioning.
Rogue Wave: The largest independent provider of cross-platform software development tools and embedded components in the world, Rogue Wave Software shortens development times and simplifies the development process. Through decades of solving the most complex problems across financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, government, academia, and other industries, Rogue Wave tools, libraries, and services enable developers to write better code, faster.
Serena Software: Serena Deployment Automation bridges the DevOps gap by simplifying and automating deployments and supporting Continuous Delivery. With Deployment Automation, teams can deliver efficient, reliable and high-quality software faster while reducing cycle times and providing feedback. Features include the ability to manage test and production environments, deployment pipeline automation, tool-chain integration, inventory tracking, the ability to create and visualize end-to-end deployment processes, and a reliable and repeatable process.
Tasktop: Tasktop integrates the tools that software delivery teams use to build great software. Tasktop Sync provides fully automated, enterprise-grade synchronization among the disparate life-cycle management tools used in software development and delivery organizations. It allows practitioners in various disciplines to collaborate on the artifacts and work items they create while operating in their tool of choice. This enhances efficiency, visibility and traceability across the entire software development and delivery life cycle. Tasktop Data collects real-time data from these tools, creating a database of cross-tool life-cycle data and providing unparalleled insight into the health of the project.
TechExcel: DevSuite helps organizations manage and standardize development and releases via agile development methods and complete traceability. We understand the importance of rapid deployment and are focused to help companies make the transition over to DevOps. To do this, we have partnered with many automation tools for testing and Continuous Integration, such as Ranorex and Jenkins, so that customers don’t have to look far to start utilizing these tools. Right out of the box, DevSuite will include these technologies. TechExcel is looking to eliminate additional costs from buying other third-party modules by offering a complete solution to support DevOps.
Wercker: Wercker is a platform to automate the development of microservices and applications by running builds and deploys within Docker containers. Companies large and small are moving away from the monolithic application architecture, replacing it with containers powered by robust teams continuously developing, testing and deploying microservices. Wercker enables teams to automate this process and rapidly onboard new contributors to maximize productivity with a sophisticated tool chain. Wercker is centered around the notion of pipelines, which are automated workflows that take your code and execute a series of steps on it—the end result being an artifact.
