{"id":1011,"date":"2022-04-07T18:30:59","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T18:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highclasswriters.com\/blog\/?p=1011"},"modified":"2022-04-07T18:31:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T18:31:00","slug":"the-software-architect-and-devops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highclasswriters.com\/blog\/the-software-architect-and-devops\/","title":{"rendered":"The Software Architect and DevOps"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
  1. A brief summary of the article<\/li>
  2. A description of the article’s relevance to Software security\u00a0<\/li>
  3. Research and reflect on the development of this topic in the past 5 years. Based on your research and personal experience, what do you think is the direction of this topic in the next 5 years?\u00a0 cite examples of past and future work to strengthen your argum<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    8 IEEE SOFTWARE | PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY
    THE PRAGMATIC
    ARCHITECT
    Editor: Eoin Woods
    Endava
    eoin.woods@endava.com
    The Software Architect
    and DevOps
    Len Bass
    ETSY UPDATES ITS production
    servers more than 50 times a day.1
    How long does your organization
    take to get an update into production? Google has a team that only
    handles incidents.2 Why? How does
    your organization handle incidents?
    SourceD builds an Amazon Web
    Services deployment script automatically with input from both the
    application developers and security
    engineers (see Figure 1).
    These are three examples of practices that fall under the name DevOps.
    They deal with the velocity of releases,
    how fast incidents are handled, and
    the enforcement of organizationally
    specified security practices. All these
    are critical for success in today\u2019s environment, and the architect is critical
    for success in adopting DevOps practices. Here, I explain why.
    The Architect\u2019s Importance
    \u201cDevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the time between
    committing a change to a system and
    the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high
    quality.\u201d3 These practices involve
    four main concerns:
    \u2022 Quickly getting a change into
    production.
    \u2022 Finding errors through automated testing.
    \u2022 Reducing or eliminating errors
    that occur during deployment.
    \u2022 Quickly finding and repairing
    faults in the system.
    All these concerns have organizational, cultural, and technical
    aspects. For example, one practice
    for quickly getting a change into
    production is to do only automated
    testing. This will mean a change in
    the quality assurance team\u2019s role or
    possibly its elimination. Changing
    a team\u2019s role is an organizational
    change, adapting to differing roles
    is a cultural change, and developing
    the appropriate set of test cases is a
    technical change.
    In all these changes, the software
    architect is important. The architect
    is usually a role model for the rest
    of the team, so his or her reaction to
    these changes will impact the team\u2019s
    morale. In this article, I focus on
    the software architect\u2019s technical
    aspects with respect to DevOps
    practices, but the organizational
    and cultural aspects shouldn\u2019t be
    ignored. In addition, DevOps practices rely heavily on tool support
    and automation. So, the architect
    must work with the team to ensure there are personnel to support
    the tools and that the team is familiar with the tools that support
    production.
    The Deployment Pipeline
    Assume a deployment pipeline that
    consists of a development environment, build environment, staging
    environment, and production environment. Figure 2 illustrates a
    simplified pipeline. A code commit
    comes from the development environment, undergoes integration and
    certain tests in the build environment, undergoes other tests in the
    staging environment, and is placed
    into production.
    All these environments should, as
    much as possible, be the same. All
    team members should develop using
    the same OS version, the same version of the supporting libraries, and
    the same IDE version. Furthermore,
    these should be the same in the production environment and intermediate test environments. The architect
    must work with the team to ensure
    that this is the case.
    Provisioning tools such as Vagrant will create identically provisioned virtual machines (VMs)
    for development. Every team member can use a Vagrant script (version controlled, of course) to create
    a new identical VM with a single
    command. If the VM\u2019s elements
    change\u2014for example, owing to a
    new release of an OS\u2014then updating the provisioning script and recreating the appropriate VMs will keep
    THE PRAGMATIC ARCHITECT
    JANUARY\/FEBRUARY 2018 | IEEE SOFTWARE 9
    the team synchronized. Other tools
    such as CloudFormation are used
    to establish the environment. Tools
    such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible
    can be used to maintain the desired
    configuration in environments other
    than the development environment.
    Continuous Deployment
    The DevOps practice that probably
    gets the most press is continuous deployment or continuous delivery.4
    This means that after a developer
    commits code to the version control
    system, it\u2019s automatically subjected
    to a variety of tests and, assuming
    the tests are passed, placed into production. Modern systems can be deployed multiple times a day. Rapid
    deployments mean that human testing is impossible. All testing must be
    automated. Even if only one deployment a day was necessary, the testing
    load would overload human testers.
    So, test automation is critical for
    rapid deployment.
    The architect works with the
    team to select test cases. Test cases
    must be complete enough for good
    coverage of both the system\u2019s functions and its qualities, such as performance and security. Tests can
    consume much time, so having the
    minimal number of them that provides good coverage for functions
    and qualities is critical. Choosing
    the test cases thus becomes important. One side effect of the ability to
    deploy rapidly is that if a developer
    discovers an error, he or she can repair it and deploy the fix quickly.
    The ability to continuously deploy
    also depends on the system architecture and the processes the developers
    use. Suppose that a new feature is to
    be added to the system that involves
    several development teams. Continuous deployment means that Team A\u2019s
    changes can be deployed regardless
    of the state of Team B\u2019s changes. Architectural choices such as using a microservice architecture can enable this
    practice. So can process activities such
    as ensuring backward compatibility
    and graceful handling of unknown
    method invocations. (For more details, see Chapter 6 of DevOps: A
    Software Architect\u2019s Perspective.3)
    The architect must not only
    guide the architectural choices but
    also work with the team so that
    developers understand and correctly
    implement the prescribed processes.
    For example, backward compatibility of services can be prescribed to
    allow for independent deployment
    of different services of a new feature.
    However, maintaining backward
    compatibility is difficult and might
    not happen owing to time pressure.
    This leads to incompatibilities and
    errors. Tests can help enforce the
    necessary processes.
    Operations
    repository (Git)
    Application
    repository (Git)
    \u2022 Application code
    \u2022 Application CF
    \u2022 Load-balancing
    setup
    \u2022 Virtual Private Cloud
    \u2022 Subnets
    \u2022 Security groups
    \u2022 CF frameworks
    \u2022 Best practice
    CloudFormation
    (CF) script
    Atlassian
    Bamboo
    FIGURE 1. Creating an Amazon Web Services deployment script automatically with
    input from developers and operations. Such enforcement of organizationally specified
    security practices falls into the category of DevOps.
    Precommit
    tests Commit
    X
    Build image
    and perform
    integration
    tests
    User
    acceptance
    testing,
    staging, and
    performance
    tests
    Deploy to
    production
    Promote
    to normal
    production
    Commit Precommit
    tests
    Developers
    FIGURE 2. A deployment pipeline in which the movement from commit to production
    is automatic. Each environment in the pipeline should, as much as possible, be the
    same.
    THE PRAGMATIC ARCHITECT
    10
    Once a new version of a service
    has been deployed, the developers
    should monitor its behavior carefully
    until they gain confidence that it has
    no problems. \u201cMonitor carefully\u201d
    means that developers should be able
    to examine measures such as latency,
    failure rates, and the number of requests serviced per unit time. This is
    the case for not only the newly deployed service but also the system as
    a whole because a new version of a
    service might impact the whole system. This monitoring involves both
    measures normally collected by the
    infrastructure, such as CPU utilization of a VM or container, and business- and service-specific measures.
    In other words, the service or new
    feature should be instrumented to
    record a variety of information and
    make that information visible so that
    the effectiveness of the change or
    new feature can be determined. The
    architecture of the service and system must support the collecting and
    reporting of a variety of measures.
    So, determining what\u2019s monitored
    and reported and how to accomplish
    this is something the architect must
    do in conjunction with the team.
    Dealing with Errors
    A final DevOps practice involving
    the architect is dealing with errors
    once the system is in production. The
    person on call, possibly a developer,
    has a short-term task and a longerterm task.
    The short-term task is to find a
    work-around for the error so that
    the system can continue to operate.
    This task requires understanding the
    system, its services, and how they interact. Although typically the architect won\u2019t be the person doing this,
    it exercises skills an architect needs.
    So, the architect should nurture team
    members who show such skills. For
    a thorough discussion of this aspect,
    see Site Reliability Engineering: How
    Google Runs Production Systems.2
    The longer-term task is to determine the root cause and propose
    a process so that this type of error
    doesn\u2019t recur. This task depends on
    the system elements\u2019 traceability. Every service in production should be
    traceable back to its constituent elements. The following aspects are
    also relevant and should be recorded:
    \u2022 the environment in which the
    service is executing,
    \u2022 the test cases to which the service was subjected,
    \u2022 the service\u2019s dependencies, and
    \u2022 the versions of the tools in the
    pipeline that were used to deploy
    the system.
    This should be done automatically
    as part of the build-and-deployment
    process.
    A second type of traceability involves recording the sequence of
    events that led to the error. This sequence includes the user request that
    triggered an error, the services that
    processed that request, and the services that the failing service invoked.
    Component traceability is the responsibility of the various tools in
    the pipeline, but determining the sequence of events that led to the error
    requires recording information similar to the monitoring information I
    discussed earlier. This type of recording is architectural. Tools such
    as Zipkin or Jaeger are useful in this
    context.
    Architects who can play the
    role I described here will
    become real leaders of
    change, as they enable fundamental
    improvements in their organization\u2019s
    capability through DevOps implementation.
    References<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    1. J. Miranda, \u201cHow Etsy Deploys
      More Than 50 Times a Day,\u201d InfoQ,
      17 Mar. 2014; www.infoq.com\/news
      \/2014\/03\/etsy-deploy-50-times-a-day.<\/li>
    2. B. Beyer et al., Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, O\u2019Reilly Media, 2016.<\/li>
    3. L. Bass, I. Weber, and Z. Liming,
      DevOps: A Software Architect\u2019s
      Perspective, Addison-Wesley, 2015.<\/li>
    4. J. Humble and D. Farley, Continuous
      Delivery: Reliable Software Releases
      through Build, Test, and Deployment
      Automation, Addison-Wesley, 2010.
      Read your subscriptions
      through the myCS
      publications portal at
      http:\/\/mycs.computer.org
      ABOUT THE AUTHOR
      LEN BASS is an adjunct faculty member for Carnegie Mellon University\u2019s
      Master of Software Engineering program. Contact him at lenbass@cmu
      .edu.
      IEEE SOFTWARE | WWW.COMPUTER.ORG\/S O FTWARE | @IEEES O FTWARE .<\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A brief summary of the article A description of the article’s relevance to Software security\u00a0 Research and reflect on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Software Architect and DevOps - 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