Embracing DevOps can be challenging. As you strive to adopt the necessary culture and select the tools and platforms that will form the foundation of your DevOps environment, though, make sure you think beyond the immediate future and don’t inadvertently paint yourself into a scalability corner:
When everything is firing on all cylinders, DevOps can be awesome. Teams work together seamlessly. Routine tasks are automated. Continuous delivery is continuously integrated, continuously tested, continuously deployed and continuously monitored. All is well, and right with the world—unless your DevOps needs begin exceeding the capacity of the platforms and tools you depend on. Scalability is a crucial element of DevOps success.
Wikipedia defines “scalability” as the capability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.
The need for scalability is one of the primary reasons that DevOps and cloud computing are so integrally linked. While it’s possible to do DevOps on some level using physical hardware or virtual servers running on hardware in a local data center, it can quickly become impractical—if not impossible. Cloud computing using platforms such as AWS, Rackspace or Microsoft Azure enables an organization to increase server capacity exponentially at the push of a button.
“Many of the issues and challenges experienced before the advent of cloud are no longer issues: Engineers now working on cloud implementations remember working at companies that feared the Slashdot effect—a massive influx of traffic that would cause servers to fail,” explains Jason McKay, VP of Engineering for Logicworks, in a blog post.
Tackling Scalability
There are a number of factors impacting scalability in your environment, which could impact the success of your DevOps. Here are three things to keep in mind to ensure your environment is ready to scale:
1. Make sure your tools and apps are scalable
The ability to scale capacity on demand—automatically—is one of the chief advantages of cloud computing, and one why cloud computing is so important to DevOps success. There is more to scalability, however, than just server and network capacity. You must also ensure that the tools you rely on can seamlessly scale with the infrastructure, and that the apps you’re delivering through your DevOps environment are designed to take full advantage of the increased capacity as well.
Read the post on DevOps.com for the complete list: 3 Tips to Avoid Painting Your DevOps Into a Scalability Corner.
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