DevOps for Small Applications

Move at high velocity, so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.

Increase the frequency and pace of releases, so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build a competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes, so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.

Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.

Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces handover inefficiencies and diminishes cycle-time. It reduces, for example, handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run.

Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.

Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository. Automated builds and tests are run upon changes in the repository. The key goals of continuous integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate software updates.

Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment or a production environment after the build stage. When continuous delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact.

The microservice’s architecture is a design approach to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism. Microservices are built around business capabilities; each service is scoped to a single purpose. You can use different frameworks or programming languages to write microservices and deploy them independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.

Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed to use code and software development techniques. Examples are version control and continuous integration. The cloud’s API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically. They do need to interact manually to set up and configure resources. Engineers can interface with infrastructure using code-based tools and treat infrastructure in a manner similar to how they treat application code. Because they are defined by code, infrastructure and servers can quickly be deployed using standardized patterns, updated with the latest patches and versions.

Organizations monitor metrics and logs to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure, organizations understand how changes or updates impact users, shedding insights into the root causes of problems or unexpected changes. Active monitoring becomes increasingly important as services must be available 24/7 and as application and infrastructure update frequency increases. Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of these data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services.

Increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. The use of DevOps tooling and automation for the software delivery process establishes collaboration. They physically bring together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations. Building on top of that, these teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. This helps speed up communication across developers, operations, and even other teams like marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the organization to align more closely on goals and projects.

This practice requires developers to periodically merge the code that they have written into a central repository. After the merge, tests and automated builds are executed. This allows a team to find issues and quickly quash out bugs, improve the application’s quality and then cut the time needed to validate your apps. Often the step of Continuous Delivery is added to the pipeline.
Use a platform such as gitLab, gitHub, BitBucket, or Azure DevOps. Use Gradle as your build tool.

This practice requires your team to release into production all code changes after it is written and then automatically built and tested. If continuous integration puts your code changes onto a testing environment, continuous delivery puts it into a production environment. What does this mean? You will always have a production-ready Java application!
Use Gradle to create your application. Use Docker, Ansible to deploy.

DevOps makes use of microservices. Instead of having one big monolithic Java application, your application is made up of smaller and independent applications.
Use domain-driven design DDD as your architecture method. Prefer standalone applications embedding your application server.

This practice means that infrastructure is allocated and then managed by using code and development techniques. Cloud services can help your development and operations teams interact with infrastructure at a scale they are comfortable with. With infrastructure as a code, servers and infrastructure are deployed fast, automatically patched and can easily be duplicated.
Use Docker and Ansible to automate your deployment.