DevOps and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) are two dominant trends that together have cutting-edge use cases. Zero code integration could bring significant improvements to the DevOps life cycle, enabling efficient movement of applications from development to production. Implemented in the right way, both technologies can rewrite the way applications are developed.
DevOps is a development approach based on continuous development and continuous integration to unify development and operations. The power of this approach has enabled behemoths such as Amazon and Netflix to leapfrog other players in their domains and set up an entirely new industry.
DevOps enables enterprises to manage the complete life cycle of applications from development to production in a faster and efficient way. In this way, teams can significantly accelerate the speed of application development life cycle.
In traditional ways of software development, IT and operations teams work in silos. To develop something, development needs to build codes, package everything and hand them over to a release manager. In the next stage, the release manager delivers the developed code to a test environment, where QA teams test the code and report the errors back to the development team. Developers again make changes and process them to the test environment. Then, again, the project is handed over to the development environment. This process entails a lot of handovers across organizational departments. Teams show resistance to changes coming down the road. Red-tape administration and the overhead involved in these activities slow down the development process.
All these hassles can be circumvented with the help of DevOps. In DevOps methodology, the development and testing teams work as one single team for the development of assets. The combined Development and Operations team achieves a balance to ensure that no efficiency is lost during the development process. All aspects of development testing, unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing and production happen in a single environment. Small iterations are used to deliver usable products at the end of each sprint.
iPaaS is an ingenious innovation for breaking down silos and ensuring operational efficiency and agility. It is a modern-day approach to automating integration between applications and marshaling them in an order. iPaas platforms bundle connectors, maps, and transformations to enable zero code integrations that are thrice more durable and efficient than conventional integrations. This unique advantage enables business teams to build integrations and lets IT teams to assume the governance role.
iPaaS solves a critical IT problem holding back organizations from leveraging their digital technologies: IT complexity. This problem was not present 15 or 20 years back, when enterprises had only three or four business systems. Enterprises used developer tools to combine applications and move data between source and target systems. They hand-coded connections for electronic data interchange. However, this method is not ideal for a scenario in which thousands of cloud and on-premises applications run in parallel. A lot of coding is required to build these integrations between these applications. Developers don’t have visibility to what other team members are building, and they create independent “islands of automation” and silos. Another relevant problem is updating integrations that remain in a constant flux.
All these challenges can be circumvented if integration becomes codeless and manageable by everyone involved. iPaaS provides custom development kits and pre-built accelerators to build ground-to-cloud integrations or cloud-to-ground integrations in a hybrid environment. Without writing a single line of code, teams can build integrations and establish a smoother symbiosis between differentiated applications. Zero code integration of iPaaS helps on four fronts: Integrate, Design, Monitor and Govern.
Real-time integration resides at the heart of both iPaaS platforms and DevOps methodologies. IPaaS can further strengthen the continuous integration muscle of DevOps. Teams can fuse iPaaS with DevOps for a transformative technological advancement called continuous zero code integration. This step can take continuous integration even one step closer to continuous integration.
IT and business teams can break down IT silos down the road and turbocharge the development process. Start-to-end integration between DevOps tools for other developers can fast forward the process of code development and code testing. A single intelligent mesh enables developers to integrate codes of developers and run them on a common build. Automated reporting ensures that developers are not stepping on each other’s code. Teams are able to make code updates or deliver things right into production hundreds or thousands of times a day.
Version control integration can be updated with the command center to provide fully automated provisioning. It further can be used to automate the entire standing. Development can be connected seamlessly with the version control system for a shared development environment in which shippable products can be developed. Individuals get a better look at their assets while working on them. This allows automation to run automation test units for frictionless development.
A microservices-based DevOps architecture is the most interesting part of DevOps and iPaaS fusion. This model has the potential to accelerate productivity significantly. Teams can deliver solutions much more quickly and access many business benefits downstream. Shorter build and deploy cycles improve deployability. It delivers the scalability to incorporate service-specific security, replication and monitoring in the build process. Fault-tolerant systems can be set up in which an error in one service affects only that respective system and not all services. Developers don’t have to use brute computational force for releasing new versions of a service. Loosely coupled microservices provide a greater degree of elasticity in the cloud. New frameworks, libraries, data sources and modular components support dynamic discovery and binding.
Any type of DevOps model can be driven by an iPaaS and their fusion should not be perceived as an enigma. Surely, there can be many more use cases out there. Melding the two for power and positive force is worth a closer look. This fusion can transcend application development in ways that are hard to imagine right now.
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