Undoubtedly, DevOps contributed a lot to the transformation of the Informational technology industry. It has changed how teams operate and cooperate during the workflow process.
Most development businesses have already reached some level of DevOps maturity. Some companies stay behind, though, but the efficiency of the CI/CD maturity model makes them reconsider their strategies and implement improved database provisioning.
When trying to reach DevOps maturity, it’s essential to understand that it’s a journey, not a destination point. In the article, you will learn more about the CI/CD maturity model, what DevOps maturity is, and its benefits to the company’s infrastructure.
What Is DevOps Maturity?
DevOps Maturity is a model that determines a business’s position to get desired results and how much needs to be done to achieve these results. One of the most significant peculiarities of this model is that it doesn’t offer a destination point. It offers a continuous process of creating and delivering products or services.
The idea is to continuously learn and grow by taking into consideration both team’s and clients’ feedback. The more a business learns, the better it deals with issues and scalability problems. Implementing the said structure is possible through several practices, such as CI/CD. Keep reading to learn how CI/CD contributes to positive results within a business.
What Is the CI/CD Maturity Model?
CI and CD are acronyms that stand for practices used in modern development practices, especially in DevOps. CI is “continuous integration”. It’s one of the best practices that enable the merging of code changes into a central repository where tests and automated builds run.
CD, on the other hand, can have different meanings. It could be continuous delivery or continuous deployment.
Continuous Integration
When developers are using continuous integration, they merge any alterations to the code to the main branch as frequently as it is possible. A new build is created to validate the changes. A build is like an artifact to make the software work. Then developers run automated tests against this build.
This process allows developers to avoid problems when integrating changes into a release branch. These challenges include broken code and the need to fix it, application or software failures due to mistakes, etc.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery helps continuous integration. Continuous delivery automatically deploys all changes to code to a production or testing environment upon completion of the build stage.
Thanks to this process, an organization can have an automated release process. It requires just clicking on the button to deploy the application. Continuous delivery allows businesses to set and control releases every day, week, month, etc.
Whichever release date schedule suits a business could work. The idea is to deploy changes to production as often and early as possible.That way, a company truly benefits from the model by releasing small batches. During smaller updates, it’s easier to spot any bugs and solve all other problems.
Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment goes even further than the above-mentioned practices. Continuous deployment releases all changes that go through a development process to clients.
Human manual intervention during this process is not necessary. If there is an issue in changes that the system tries to deploy, then a failed test will prevent it from integrating into a release configuration.
Continuous deployment offers improvement both to customers and developers. Developers don’t experience the pressure of an upcoming Release Day, so they work in more positive environments. As soon as the software or application is ready, developers see it go live.
Customers enjoy updates more frequently and offer their feedback each time a new update is uploaded. This feedback is used to improve the product. It’s a win-win situation.
How CI/CD Relate to Each Other?
Continuous integration is needed if a business wants to implement both continuous delivery and continuous deployment. And continuous deployment is simply a continuous automated delivery – releases are frequent but happen automatically.
CI/CD Maturity Model Benefits
Implementing the CI/CD model has several benefits to a development company:
- Improved product or service performance.
- Smaller code changes and more frequent releases.
- Fault isolation makes the process of detecting the source of errors more functional by reducing the scope of issues.
- Improved and faster (MTTR) Mean Time to Resolution.
- More accurate test results.
- Balanced routines when developing software.
- Reduced back logs.
As a result, customers are more satisfied with the products they receive, and developers feel self-fulfillment and no stress when the product is immediately released. Moreover, deploying this structure means that the process is more focused on customer satisfaction rather than based on cost control.
