Shortening time-to-MakRT is very important for any enterprise, which directly determines customer satisfaction, market competitiveness and even profitability. But when IT comes to deploying applications, most enterprise IT teams have, to some extent, a problem between Dev and Ops, two departments that work around the same application but in very different ways.

Many managers are thinking about how Dev and Ops can work together to shorten time-to-market, or DevOps, without any “misunderstanding.”

Let’s talk about how Docker and Kubernetes can help DevOps become more effective.

The traditional enterprise

In the traditional DevOps approach, developers write code, submit it to a Git repository, and then check how it works locally and in the development environment.

We start the code build process using a CI tool like Jenkins, which also runs functional tests during build time. If the test passes successfully, we merge the changes into the release branch.

Operations will use tools to prepare scripts for application deployment production and eventually put the changes into production (newer versions).

Problems with traditional DevOps

The first problem is that operations and developers use different tools. For example, most developers don’t necessarily know how to use scripting tools, and the task of preparing for release falls to operations, which often doesn’t know how the application works.

The second problem is that development environments are often manually updated rather than automated. As a result, the development environment is so unstable that changes made by one developer can interrupt changes made by another, and resolving such conflicts often takes so much time that it is not surprising that the time-to-market becomes longer.

The third problem is that a development environment can be very different from a staging environment or a production environment. This may result in a release prepared by the developer that may not work properly in the staging environment, or even if the test passes successfully in the staging environment, there may be problems in production, and the rollback process in production may not be easy.

The fourth problem is that scripting is time-consuming and error-prone.

Optimize DevOps with Docker

The main advantage of Docker for DevOps is that both developers and operations use the same tool — Docker. During the development phase, developers create Docker images from Dockerfiles on the local computer and run them in the development environment.

O&m uses the same Docker image, and Docker is used for updates to the staging and production environments. It should be noted that when updating to the new version of the software, we do not patch the Docker container. In other words, the new version of the software adopts a new Docker image and a new copy of the Docker container, rather than repairing the old Docker container.

Based on this, we can create immutable development, staging, and production environments.

There are several benefits to using this approach: first, you have a high degree of control over all changes, because with immutable Docker images and containers to make changes, we can roll back to previous versions at any time; Development, staging, and production environments are becoming more similar than scripting tools; With Docker, we can make sure that if something works in a development environment, it can also be used at staging and in production, which is what we call consistency.

So how do Docker and Kubernetes make DevOps more effective

  • The process of creating an application topology with multiple interconnected components using Docker has become easier to understand
  • The load balancing configuration process is greatly simplified thanks to the built-in service and ingress concepts
  • Thanks to Kubernetes’ Deployments, StatefulSets, ReplicaSets and other features, rolling updates or blue-green deployment is easy
  • More powerful CI/CD tools available
  • Kubernetes uses the Service Mesh tool to provide out-of-the-box multi-cloud deployment scenarios

About Rainbond

Rainbond is an “application-centric” open source PaaS that deeply integrates kubernetes-based container management, ServiceMesh microservices architecture best practices, multi-type CI/CD application building and delivery, multi-data center resource management, and more. To provide users with cloud native application life-cycle solutions, build an ecosystem of interconnection between applications and infrastructure, application to application, and infrastructure to meet the requirements of agile development, efficient operation, and lean management required to support rapid business development.

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