As anyone who has ever been set up on blind dates by friends can attest, finding the right match in today’s world is a tricky feat.
There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that the frantic pace of life makes such matchmaking more difficult than ever. That said, when the right set of complimentary traits exist and there’s a willingness to find common ground, things can work out.
Spike Jonzian-notions of artificial intelligence aside, certain technological partnerships are increasingly being perceived as “a perfect marriage” within the context of DevOps automation.
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These technological matrimonies closely support the underlying tenets of DevOps methodology—collaboration, experimentation and increased velocity. In fact, it’s easy to wonder why no one ever conjoined them before. But we were using traditional waterfall development and operations and so couldn’t conceive of such a thing. On the other hand, emerging availability of tooling supporting new integrated workflows represents a significant catalyst.
Finding the Perfect Fit
One such DevOps confederation getting a lot of attention is the matchmaking of continuous integration (CI) and application performance management (APM) technologies. Tying together these once-disparate systems makes a lot of sense, despite the fact that few tools would seemingly appeal to more (traditionally) polarized constituencies.
Continuous integration has been a staple of the development community for many years. It emerged as teams evolved the practice of long build times into more frequent check-ins to deliver code and look for potential errors more quickly. Today, with the rise of CI tools such as the Cloudbees Jenkins platform, some development teams are touting tens of thousands of builds per day.
On the other end of the spectrum, squarely on the turf of IT operations, APM has been evolving rapidly over the past few years as organizations have sought to improve use experience and applications reliability via dedicated monitoring. Enabling this ability to identify and address emerging issues has resulted in APM becoming the fastest-growing segment in the IT ops management market, according to Gartner.
DevOps matchmaking factors in when you bring these tools together to create an automated workflow that spans their respective use cases. A cross-functional team can leverage APM-level monitoring and KPIs within the domain of CI and testing to identify potential performance obstacles introduced in new code. Doing so then rather than waiting to respond later in the applications life cycle benefits everyone.
Reaping the Benefits
For example, say an e-commerce applications developer has implemented a new inventory search functionality—something considered a key differentiator by business management. The developer knows this feature could rely heavily on some back-end database system and wants to ensure it’s tested properly, even as the code is being introduced.
Integrating APM and CI allows the entire team to monitor the process and test various conditions related to the update, tracking multiple builds and looking out for related performance issues. Such integration also allows for centralized tracking of other key attributes such as build number, status and build date, to further ease management.
Most importantly, by tying these two critical aspects of the applications delivery life cycle together, the collaboration and feedback loops required to truly embrace DevOps methodology become ever more valuable as these core Dev and Ops functions become intrinsically linked.
If this type of DevOps advancement gets your heart pumping, you’re not alone. Later this month, we’ll host a webcast here on DevOps.com featuring experts from CA Technologies and Cloudbees. They’ll be discussing the benefits of matchmaking with APM + CI integration. They’ll also detail real-world benefits organizations leveraging integration of our respective technologies (CA APM and Cloudbees Jenkins) enjoy.
We obviously feel that this is a DevOps tooling marriage that will mature, change and stand the test of time. We’d love to garner your questions and feedback on the topic.
Which is all good, because thankfully there’s no such thing as Tinder for DevOps … yet.
