The author has been engaged in providing R&D efficiency improvement solutions for enterprises for more than ten years. He has provided DevOps consulting and solution implementation solutions for hundreds of domestic enterprises, covering industries including: finance, communications, manufacturing, Internet, fast-moving sales, etc. industry.
The core of DevOps is the improvement of R&D efficiency. Efficiency improvement cannot be achieved without the support of powerful tools. Therefore, with DevOps in full swing today, the construction of enterprise DevOps integrated platform tools that carry R&D efficiency improvement has become very hot.
Therefore, during the tool chain construction process, many people will have these questions: What is the current development status of DevOps tools? Why have a large number of DevOps integrated tool platforms begun to emerge in China recently, with many powerful companies even developing their own DevOps integrated platform tools? How to develop self-developed DevOps integrated platform tools? What will be the future development direction of DevOps?
The following content will help everyone avoid detours in the process of building DevOps tools.
Current Development of DevOps Tools
1.1 Rich set of available tools
Since the term DevOps was popularized in 2010, all tools related to software development process management can be included in the DevOps tool set. These tools can be divided into two major categories in terms of functional scope:
All-In-One category (DevOps integrated platform category): That is, the tool has the management capabilities of the main process of software development, such as Microsoft's Azure DevOps in the picture above, Atlassian's Family Bucket (including the well-known Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, and Bamboo) wait).
Domain-focused tools: Most of these tools only focus on one or more capabilities, such as Jira, ZenTao, Clickup, etc., which only focus on item-based tracking management. Most of these tools’ core capabilities are item-based tracking management and can cover Common software development management processes for various enterprises such as requirements, changes, and defects.
1.2 The explosion of domestic DevOps tools
Currently, a large number of DevOps integrated platform tools have appeared in China, such as Alibaba's Yunxiao, Huawei's DevCloud, JD.com's Xingyun, Gitee, Boyun and many other commercial DevOps integrated platform tools. Of course, many companies have begun to develop their own platform tools. There are three main reasons for this situation:
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With the development of the open source community, it has become easier for enterprises to customize platform tools based on open source tools that are more suitable for their own requirements.
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After years of development, the domestic software industry has gradually formed a set of management methods suitable for its own needs, and many excellent tools have also been produced. As enterprises integrate tools, they gradually have the foundation for an integrated DevOps platform.
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Due to the international environment, some companies have begun to gradually abandon the internationally mature and excellent DevOps integrated platform tools, and instead seek excellent domestic alternatives, or simply develop their own.
1.3 Domestic DevOps tool construction issues
Although there are many domestic DevOps products on the market, there are more or less some shadows of open source tools, and some are simply based on open source tools. This method can put the product into use quickly, but it also has many problems.
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Technical packaging is not in place
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Rigid process management model
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Poor scalability and strong reliance on secondary development for customization
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Strong ability in management dimension, insufficient professionalism in engineering dimension
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Missing measurable design and scattered data
DevOps tool optimization solution
2.1 Enterprise DevOps integrated platform capabilities
A good DevOps platform product should have powerful business functions from R&D process tracking and management to end-to-end automated high-quality product generation and delivery:
R&D process coverage
It should completely cover the main processes of software development: process tracking (requirements, changes, defects, testing, etc.), source code management, automated assembly lines, test management, product management, etc.
Ready out of the box
In order to meet the needs of major customers to the greatest extent, we provide out-of-the-box configurations and tools, such as: providing agile, Kanban and other management tools, providing out-of-the-box templates for pipelines of mainstream technology stacks, and providing calling for mainstream automated testing tools and environments Deployment pipeline tasks.
Teamwork
In terms of engineering management, there should be cross-system and cross-team collaborative management capabilities.
End-to-end DevOps tool chain
You must have the ability to assist enterprises in building end-to-end DevOps generalized pipelines. In other words, DevOps platform tools can integrate all process tools, R&D tools, testing tools, and operation and maintenance tools involved in software development.
DevOps measurement system
If you want to establish an enterprise-level DevOps continuous improvement mechanism and have a sustainable and feasible R&D efficiency improvement system, then R&D measurement must be the most important basis. Now that the tool functions are complete enough, the biggest selling point of the product should be to help discover problems, analyze problems, and provide data basis for solving problems, and finally become a built-in metric for continuous improvement of the enterprise.
everything is code
In addition to demand management, other main functional modules of DevOps integrated platform tools should be able to be orchestrated through scripts, that is, Everything As Code.
2.2DevOps integrated platform structure
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Universal basic management capabilities
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Flexible process management configuration capabilities
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Have complete product expansion capabilities
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Provide standard Web API to external parties
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Extended framework based on DevOps integrated platform products
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Complete message push mechanism
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Indispensable product customization capabilities
The ultimate form concept of DevOps tool chain
The future coding trend must be lightweight IDEs. You can check the current popularity of Web IDEs. The best proof is that VS Code has gained a large number of users in a short period of time. Then based on IDE web page, DevOps will definitely move toward lightweighting. It should no longer need to maintain a tool interface with complex functions as it does now. These functions should be directly integrated into the IDE. DevOps platform tools should have only three core modules in functional design: process management, background services, and measurement.
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Process management: Mainly provided for stakeholders and managers to view information and operate processes. This function requires an external display page. However, the development team only needs to use a lightweight IDE to complete all operations. All information and operations can be directly and accurately displayed and operated on the IDE.
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Backend services: Provide other core services including code management, pipeline management and product management.
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Measurement: All data related to development activities can be displayed according to any dimension, including process management data, engineering management data, behavioral data (such as developers' code development habits, development time, code quality analysis, etc.). And can quickly form reports for display.
Technically, the entire environment should be running in containers running on a containerized orchestration platform, and the differences compared to traditional DevOps platform tools are:
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Environment: DevOps platform tools, development IDE, DevOps automated pipeline operating environment, application operating environment
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DevOps components: rich DevOps functional interfaces, universal JS integration framework, real-time dynamic collection of R&D data
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DIS (DevOps Integration Service): easy-to-configure integration service, compatible with mainstream DevOps tool sets, open source operations, and easy for users to customize