Continuous Integration

DevOps is more than just a buzzword; it’s about delivering value to customers faster and more reliably. Jonathan Thorpe explains eight mistakes that can dramatically increase cycle time and slow the flow of releases to customers, which is counter to the goals of DevOps.

The IT industry is abuzz with conversations regarding continuous delivery, DevOps, and cloud development—and with good reason. Advances in agile software development methods, the integration of these practices into both on-premise and public clouds, and the emergence of end-to-end cloud platforms have been shown to cut development cycles by as much as half, greatly improve quality, and reduce costs. Even though this is an unbelievably exciting time, we need to work together on the issue of the “fractured cloud.”

Developers must have good feedback to ensure productivity. Most shops have a continuous integration (CI) build process that allows the developer to quickly know if a build failed, and some shops have an automatic deploy of the CI build to provide website feedback. Lance Lyons writes about an approach to automating the update of databases in a CI environment.

A continuous build may be a great idea, but it takes more than a great idea to be successful. In this article, Tony Sweets describes his personal experience with difficult build servers and his organization's move toward a continuous build.