Our Capabilities
DevOps is part of the Infrastructure Services we offer to companies to reduce and improve systems development life cycles and provide continuous delivery of high-quality software.
One of our primary goals is to support all the hardware and software parts of the development process, such as: coding, building, testing, packaging, releasing, configuring, and monitoring. This assures that all resources and tools that form your development ecosystem are available and working properly in different cloud technologies like Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Google Cloud.
Our main guiding principle for a successful DevOps implementation covers all the steps within a cycle as you can see in the next picture:
Working Together, We Analyze the Situation and Implement Solutions
Our team of experts has successfully implemented whole lifecycles for our clients, providing them with cutting-edge practices and technologies to create high-quality software solutions at a large scale.
DevOps is complex, and it affects all areas of infrastructure and codebase. Deploying this methodology requires planning and execution, both inside and outside your application ecosystem. It might also require refactoring application-specific components, which are sometimes obsolete. We create and maintain a highly detailed checklist of activities and automated key steps to ensure quality and accuracy through rigorous testing.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) fill the gaps between development and operations enforcing automation in building, testing, and deploying applications. This process compiles the incremental code changes, then packages them into software deliverables.
Not only does DevOps produces the packages to automatically release and deploy your application, but also it has the capability to link the releases all the way up with the user stories, PBIs, or documentation elements in your ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) solution (like Azure DevOps, JIRA, etc.) so this way you have full tracking in the software development.
During this process, we execute a set of important automated tests like Unit Tests where we ensure code works as you expect by addressing the smallest possible unit of behavior, Integration Tests where we ensure that multiple parts of the software interact with each other as expected such as app/database interactions or APIs (Application Program Interface), End-to-end tests where we look for the entire functionality of the application based on GUI automated tools, Performance tests to guarantee the performance of the whole application using Load testing for scenarios where demand increases and Stress testing to analyze the behavior when the app exceeds the expected usage.
The main goal is to allow the detection of bugs and issues in the early stages, increase productivity, and speed up the release cycles in small chunks in order to accelerate the production of the software, in contrast with traditional methods where simple changes are used to be done in one single large batch with long periods of time in between.
Measuring and Monitoring
What do we measure? Some examples of automated metrics are:
- Application usage
- Database consumption
- Network latency
- High concurrency
- Errors, exceptions, and bugs
- Third-party endpoints like: APIs, ODBCs, TCP, and sockets
- Security threats like DDoS (distributed denial of service) or intrusion attempts
Considering the automated metrics, we can also take actions like improving code performance, horizontally scaling when user demand increases and vertically scaling when algorithms require heavy processing. Some techniques like Call Stack analysis are leveraged in this step to diagnose and understand the issues from the root cause, as well as the implications they have for other application components that may be affected.
Our team is experienced in using a variety of technologies to gather and process these metrics:
- Application Insights for Azure
- CloudWatch for AWS
- Cloud Monitoring for Google Cloud
Custom metrics can also be added to your DevOps implementation, and we can help you to define and implement additional metrics according to your business needs. As you can see, we can cover the whole spectrum of DevOps practices starting from the planning all the way to the Measuring/Monitoring and all the processes in between using top-of-the-line tools for the main cloud platforms.
ROI (return on investment) from Day One
The main benefit for our clients is the possibility to have more frequent and painless deployments for applications where deploying was a cumbersome process before implementing DevOps. However, the core benefit of implementing a DevOps strategy for your company is far more strategic and relevant to your business to be highly sustainable.
Our professional team is specifically trained for assessing your current state in the DevOps journey and equipped with the tools to provide you with the optimal approaches to attain the desired state in DevOps. Let us do this together. Contact a MAS representative right now, and we will be happy to help you with your DevOps projects.
