How to Simplify Agile Development with the Cloud?
The Agile Manifesto was created in 2001 by 17 professionals (The Agile Alliance) at a working retreat in Utah. Since then, agile development has been widely adopted by technical and project management teams across the globe. Agile development is based upon an iterative development strategy that encourages collaboration, self-organization, and cross-team functionality.
The agile movement has grown significantly as cloud technology has become mainstream. The core values and principles of the Agile Manifesto bind well with cloud technology and software development. The technology that the cloud has given developers has created an agile platform that supports the fundamental values of agile - early release and continuous development.
These values, now commonly known as CICD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Development) have transformed web application development. Organizations that leverage cloud technology have the ability to rapidly deploy, test, and update applications in quick succession.
A quick refresh on Agile Development
Most modern bluechip companies claim to already be working in an agile environment. For some, it is seen as a marketing initiative to hire talent or please investors. But there are many existing companies and startups that are doing it very well. They are creating a new experience for their customers, an experience that grows with the customer as their needs change.
The core principles of the Agile Manifesto include the ability to embraceàand welcome change. Notàonly a change in an employeeââ¬â¢s thinking but changes in the business direction influence changes in the development process, no matter how late in the development timeline it is. This way of thinking helps to provide a software product that reaches and exceeds the clientââ¬â¢s expectations.
The ability to deliver application code or system infrastructure frequently is another core concept. CICD greatly focuses on this philosophy. Sometimes called sprints, application delivery can take days, weeks, or months, depending on what the requirements are. This rapid delivery process is achieved by technology and collaboration. Working together, often face-to-face (or via technology such as Teams and Slack) inspires ideas and gives team members clear guidance of who is working on what.
Collaboration enables developers to build projects. Agile teams are expected to manage themselves and their own workload. The idea is to empower the professional, which will, in turn, create motivated individuals who will provide long-term benefits to the organization. An arena of technical excellence can be achieved via this approach.
One of the final key principles of agile development is the ability to measure the team’s progress, regularly reflecting on the progress that has been made. But also, don't be afraid to adjust the program or end-game objective of the project if needed. This approach helps to keep things simple and creates a sustainable development process.
Cloud and Agile Development
The cloud offers developers and system administrators the platform needed to be agile. It allows an organization to respond to resource demands, and it reduces some of the necessity for time-consuming, administrative change control procedures.
A core cloud technology, known as infrastructure-as-code (IAC), is a process of managing and provisioning infrastructure using code. Common markup languages used are YAML, JSON, or JINJA2. This is where DevOps professionalism was born. Deploying IAC requires an engineer capable of writing some code, but also someone who knows about IT operations and infrastructure.
Infrastructure-as-code is an interactive toolset. There are many on the marketplace but some of the most popular are Ansible, Terraform, Chef, and Puppet. A huge benefit of IAC is that it allows for unified, identical infrastructure to be built rapidly and in exactly the same fashion. This is a massive benefit for highly regulated industries, as servers can be deployed within any cloud provider, and all servers will be identical. Same patch levels, same security hardening, same permissions, same monitoring software, Antivirus, etc.
IAC integrates with all cloud hypervisors, public, private, or hybrid. It can be used for day-to-day system administration as well as complex software rollouts. IAC is highly automated, therefore software developers can schedule and monitor update runs, and if any problems arise the systems can be rolled back up instantly.
None of this would be possible without cloud network load balancers. These can isolate different parts of a production system for upgrades, resulting in the end-user having no idea a major upgrade is in progress.
A successful IAC environment requires an extensive Test, Dev, and UAT sandbox where upgrades can be tested prior to deploying to production servers. The cloud greatly benefits this philosophy as test Cloud VPS can be provisioned near-instantly, directly from storage or from a predefined image.
The software development cycle should include a period of testing for user feedback, but if the agile project demands speed, then this can be bypassed as the technology is fluid enough to roll back to the prior desired state configuration.
Using the cloud for agile development will result in increased application quality, helping to give the customer what they want via instant feedback. The cloud gives organizations the resources for an on-demand service. If there are peaks in usage, auto-deployment rules can be configured to increase server performance or increase the number of servers running the task.
The cloud reduces the time it takes to get the application to market. This is vital for organizations with a product to sell. Being able to put that product online and available in no time can be a massive financial benefit, and this is one of the reasons why cloud adaptation is skyrocketing.
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