As DevOps has become more common, these teams are tasked with uniting everything from coding to deploying and monitoring applications. Build Engineering forms the foundation for all those processes and is essential for building code. Its tools vary according to the operating system you’re building on and by programming language. DevOps needs to work with Build Engineering, but the two don’t usually connect. And that’s a problem.
Over the last 10 years, there’s been a shift toward DevOps. Previously there was a discrete division between coding, done by developers and engineers, and deployment, done by Ops. However, it became apparent that for companies to optimize benefits such as productivity, development and operations shouldn’t be so disparate. The result of which is DevOps.
Along with the shift to DevOps have come several trade-offs—namely trading security for speed, certainty for agility and proprietary code for open source:
- Speed: Getting to market quickly has become critical to success. Speed now takes greater priority over fixing vulnerabilities, which can always be addressed in the next release (hopefully). And retrofitting for security and vulnerabilities after the fact becomes a big blocker for development and engineering teams. At the end of the day, the risk of lost profits is greater than the risk of potential unknown threats.
- Agility: Agility trumps certainty in the race to market. For instance, iterative pushes to production do away with fixed, known road maps in favor of implementing whatever this week’s most important feature/functionality is. The trend toward immutability is also important here; it’s generally simpler and quicker to throw away something that’s broken or outdated rather than trying to fix or update it.
- Open source: Due to the greater innovation, reduced costs and transparency it delivers, open source has won over proprietary code. Rather than focusing on creating proprietary code, developers can quickly iterate on a solution by assembling open source code, accelerating time to market. Plus, the ability to take from what has already been created can free up your dev teams to innovate and build IP for your enterprise efforts.
For most, the tension between fixing something and knowing if it will break something upstream hasn’t been eliminated. You may be able to quickly update and patch a single solution, but how will this impact you once you push to your CI stream? Even for mature DevOps organizations, there’s a hidden opportunity cost associated with two factors that are overlooked: open source programming languages and Build Engineering.
Overhead is added to your DevOps teams when you retrofit your open source language of choice with new versions, dependencies, security patches and so on adds. Teams should be focused on the things that matter—creating and delivering the latest release.
On top of that, Build Engineering takes a hit each time the underlying open source language is retrofitted. You need to rebuild all your developer environments, CI/CD systems and production environments. All of this build engineering work is manual, slows down time to market and eats up valuable engineering resources. Plus, you’re not certain your rebuild and update will provide performance improvements that warrant the update.
Since DevOps already relies on automation, it makes sense to apply this tool to the retrofitting and building of your open source languages and seamlessly connect to the rest of your DevOps cycle. You could ensure build reproducibility, dependency management and compliance with your corporate security and license criteria. For example:
- Build impact – What if you could understand the performance improvements (if any) that could be gained by taking the latest build?
- System update – Consider the benefits of being able to update all of your impacted systems across dev, test and even production environments with the latest build using a single command.
- Packaging – If each continuous build could be packaged in multiple ways—any form factor for any operating system—how would it change your workflow?
- Build validation – Imagine that every continuous build could be vetted against your smoke test, inclusive of compliance with your security and license criteria, so you knew whether it was ready to deploy.
- Continuous builds – What if every time a new version of a library or patch for a vulnerability was found, a new build was kicked off and you were notified when it was done? Then you could keep up with your continuous deployments.
The domino effect is a phenomenon that DevOps must deal with on an all-too-often basis. Dev and Ops came together for greater productivity, but unforeseen dependency issues regularly gum up the works. That’s the reason automation is such a useful tool, one that you can used to stop the domino effect as you automate your build pipeline for open source languages. It’s truly possible today to benefit your business by ensuring build reproducibility, dependency management and compliance with your corporate security and license criteria.