Modernize your application deployment through DevOps adoption

Digital Velocity continually evaluates the technology landscape for solutions and vendors who are leading the charge in digital disruption and setting the standard for adoption. The DevOps Enablement engagement centers primarily on two vendor solutions considered the leader in their technology space.

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps is a cloud-based, complete DevOps toolchain that includes version control, build automation, release management, and a variety of collaboration and project management tools. The DevOps Enablement engagement leverages Azure DevOps for its strong yet easy to use VCS and CI/CD tooling.

Hashicorp’s Terraform is the industry standard for Infrastructure as Code due to its declarative syntax, extensive provider ecosystem, and robust features, allowing users to define and manage infrastructure in a scalable and efficient manner. Its widespread adoption is driven by its support for multi-cloud environments and simplified infrastructure provisioning.

The primary goal of the Discovery Workshops is to establish goals and targets for the Terraform and Azure DevOps design. The focus is on the customer’s people, processes, and technologies as the primary tenants for a solid and scalable DevOps solution. Discovery sessions are designed to gather organizational information and baselining. Inputs from stakeholders or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from multiple teams are required to drive an effective DevOps solution. The Digital Velocity architect will collect inputs from the discovery sessions to influence and shape the overall design.

Additionally, Digital Velocity and the customer will review and identify a single application that will be the use case for the DevOps deployment. Certain applications are good candidates for DevOps deployments and the workshops will be used to help down select which application should be targeted.

The DevOps Solution Design phase is where the Digital Velocity architect begins hosting interactive design sessions with key decision makers. These workshops are collaborative in nature as the architect will educate on the technologies and solicit feedback on certain design elements. Education involves both conceptual reviews of CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code, as well as any relevant vendor specifics of Azure DevOps and Terraform.

The final step of the Design phase is delivery and certification of the DevOps deployment design. The architect will share an initial set of diagrams, collect feedback, and then generate a final design to be jointly approved by key stakeholders.

The final phase of the DevOps Enablement engagement is the Implementation phase. Digital Velocity engineers deploy and configure all DevOps elements based on the agreed upon design. This includes the configuration of the ADO organization, use case-specific ADO project, and development of Terraform code required for application infrastructure deployment.

This phase is performed in paired-programming style, where Digital Velocity DevOps Engineers are coupled with the customer’s engineers during development. A normal cadence involves daily stand-ups and regular working sessions or sync-ups.

At the conclusion of this phase, a fully functional CI/CD pipeline is established for application deployment, including both infrastructure and application code. Customer engineers will be trained on how to operate the pipeline as well as update infrastructure code and application configuration.

The DevOps Enablement engagement provides customers with the tools and education to begin applying DevOps strategies to their current and future application landscapes. Customer engineers have been trained on how to:

• Recognize good application candidates for DevOps
• Develop a deployment architecture
• Generate Infrastructure as Code
• Build CD pipelines for application deployment

Digital Velocity will always be there for our customers who need our expertise in these practices and methodologies. But customers can feel confident in their own skills after this enablement engagement. CDW and Digital Velocity will always advocate for making our customers stronger and more competent in their ability to deliver IT.