Best Practices for Release Management
DevOps is a set of practices to develop, test, and release your code in frequent small steps. One of the core practices of DevOps is release management which has developers schedule their application builds throughout each stage of development and across various environments.
If you are responsible for a software production environment, there is a high chance that you have probably implemented multiple changes in the production environment all the time.
In this post, we’ll examine a cutting-edge release management strategy to make it simple for you to control release delivery and prevent bottlenecks.
What is Release?
Releases focus on the transition from development through testing and deployment for a single application or a group of connected apps or resources. They are a collection of changes packed into a single stack. Dedicated resources and employees are needed to manage a DevOps lifecycle. The software development life cycle (SDLC) concludes with the release phase.
What is Release Management?
The process of scheduling, creating, testing, delivering, and managing software releases is referred to as release management. It guarantees that the apps and improvements the company needs are quickly delivered by release teams while protecting the reliability of the current production environment.
What are the Success Markers for Release Management?
To be considered successful, a release must meet the following criteria:
- It has minimal to no effect on existing users.
- Quick deployment.
- It has been implemented within budget.
- It meets the needs of present and new users, as well as technological advancements and/or competitive expectations.
Why is Modern Release Management so important?
Application deployment is indisputably the most crucial and high-risk phase of any software development cycle, directly influencing application availability and business flow.
The industry’s reaction to modern delivery is DevOps. DevOps improves team communication, allowing firms to adapt quickly to market shifts and provide exclusive software upgrades to consumers. It depends on continuous integration, testing, and delivery to decrease risk and gain regular and timely responses. The following are the primary advantages of release management:
- Planning: When so many updates happen in your environments and applications, you want a more detailed approach to planning for what changes and updates will be going into production. Implementing planning gives the users predictable release date targets for delivery teams.
- Confidence: The implementation of modern release management gives you a very high confidence that whatever updates and modifications will be released into production works together, and you don’t have to worry about application stack failures or release errors.
- Decrease impacts: Modern release management decreases impacts from build errors and dependency installs from your application, specifically on your business, and ensures the end users achieve their goals.
To test a release branch, DevOps teams often build up multiple staging environments. A staging environment aids in the creation of optimal deployments. It accomplishes this by allowing DevOps teams to check release assumptions through testing and monitoring before allowing the release to go into production.
CTO.ai Release management workflow organizes and manages your application build as it moves through numerous iterations, phases, and environments throughout your software deployment and release process.
CTO.ai Continuous Release Availability Workflow.
The CTO.ai Continuous release cadence addresses the need for continuous deployment. The quick cadence workflow allows for better control over your application dependencies and more frequent releases. This makes your release window less prone to application bottlenecks. With this model, your engineering team can release solutions into production whenever they want to use best practices like:
- Fully automated deployment
- Self-healing services
- Fully automated testing
- Self-service workflows using Commands
When you automate the process of installing and configuring software, you reduce errors in your application and allow for a more repeatable release. You can run your commands in your testing environments, staging, and production environments, and eventually, the release cycle becomes a well-tested and planned-out process.
Summary
CTO.ai’s release and deployment management process also guarantees that your transition to service operations is as smooth as possible and that adequate training and documentation are available to offer continuing support for your new service.
Author: Isaac Arogbonlo