According to the Accelerate 2019 State of DevOps report, high-performing DevOps organizations achieve over 200 times more frequent deployments and over 2,600 times faster recovery times than low performers. These outcomes have been realized by both forward-leaning organizations such as Amazon, which deploys code every 11.6 seconds, and more traditional enterprises that have been in existence for a long time. For instance, Nordstrom, a well-known American retailer, increased the release frequency for its mobile app from twice per year to monthly.

Embracing DevOps results in significant advantages, including improved team collaboration, cooperation and productivity. Companies can get digital products, applications and services to market faster because of the higher deployment and release frequency. Because development and operations teams are not operating in silos, unaware of each other’s constraints, there are lower failure rates within production environments. Cooperation leads to faster recovery times when there are issues with deployment.

To achieve DevOps success, teams must engage in a new approach to network infrastructure, and the network infrastructure must have the following five attributes.

Automation

Automating repetitive tasks, such as configuring DNS or a firewall, saves a lot of time and effort. It eliminates manual errors by standardizing deployment and configuration of network infrastructure. Automation can be achieved by using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which entails using an application programming interface (API) to create, modify and shut down infrastructure. This ensures that a repeatable, consistent configuration can be created. This code can be version-controlled, which serves as a form of documentation—it’s easy to detect what changes were made by whom in case there’s an issue—and rollback to a stable state is quick and easy.

Standardization puts an end to “It worked in my environment” or “It worked on my machine” as any issues can be easily reproduced, resulting in faster resolution times. Support for IaC tools, such as Terraform, is essential for network infrastructure to advance DevOps practices.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

CI is a coding best practice wherein code is checked into version control repositories frequently. It provides a consistent and automated way to build, package and test applications. CD picks up where CI ends and deploys applications in an automated fashion in a variety of environments, including production, development, test and sandbox.

There are a variety of tools, such as Jenkins and Ansible, that DevOps teams use for CI/CD integration. It is imperative for network infrastructure to integrate with these tools to accelerate deployment velocity.

Elasticity

DevOps teams spin up and spin down test/development/sandbox environments routinely. Infrastructure may also be needed for short periods to account for seasonality or for handling sudden surges in traffic and demand. DevOps-friendly network infrastructure must be elastic to support these activities.

Appliance-based vendors who provide network services are not scalable as they impose artificial limits on their usage (such as queries per second or leases per second) and require organizations to anticipate their needs in advance. When there is a need, organizations have to spend time procuring these appliances, waiting to receive them and, finally, deploying and managing them—a very inefficient way to manage demand.

Support for Containers

Containers are the foundation for developing cloud-native applications. Containers allow developers to package up application code and all its dependencies, including libraries and other binaries, as well as configuration files needed for running the application. This enables applications to be executed quickly and reliably across a variety of environments.

Containers provide flexibility and portability of applications across public, private, hybrid cloud and even bare-metal environments. They are lightweight, as all containers share the underlying machine’s OS system kernel. They also lend themselves to greater modularity, which is essential for developing microservices-based applications.

Instead of a monolithic application consisting of a three-tiered architecture, a microservices-based application consists of several smaller services that perform one function and one function only. It’s easier to scale, easier to manage and faster to develop such applications. Because containers have a small footprint, they are most suited for microservices architecture.

In order to support containerized applications, network infrastructure must first be compatible with containers. Network infrastructure must be able to configure DNS, allocate IP addresses for containerized applications, route traffic intelligently between containers and balance loads for optimal performance. Network infrastructure must also support Kubernetes, the most widely deployed orchestration platform. To ensure that the needs of DevOps teams are met, it is important to inquire with network services vendors about compatibility with containers and Kubernetes, as many legacy, appliance-based solutions cannot support this technology. 

Self-Service Access

To move quickly, development teams may need to configure network infrastructure for test/development/sandbox environments. Having to submit tickets to network operations teams that use legacy appliances for delivering network services significantly slows down application development and deployment. Providing self-service access to network infrastructure, such as firewalls, load balancers, DNS and DHCP for development teams, eliminates the reliance of these teams on network operations teams. Self-service with robust role-based access controls reduces the deployment time and increases efficiency while freeing up network teams for more strategic projects.

Conclusion

DevOps attempts to minimize friction in application deployment by providing autonomy to development teams so that they don’t have to rely on network administrators to provide the necessary infrastructure needed for development and testing. But, the move to DevOps requires more than a consolidation of teams.

Success requires best practices such as automation, CI/CD and self-service access to infrastructure, as well as support for containers and Kubernetes, which are key to building modern, cloud-native applications. Teams that incorporate these capabilities will see increased agility and speed that lead to shorter delivery time, higher-quality applications and improved communication and collaboration throughout a product’s lifecycle.